Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels: Eye of the Ichthyosaur 2012046649, 9780415819435, 9780203383230

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Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels

Criticism about the neo-Victorian novel—a genre of historical fiction that re-imagines aspects of the Victorian world from present-day perspectives —has expanded rapidly in the last fifteen years but given little attention to the engagement between science and religion. Of great interest to Victorians, this subject often appears in neo-Victorian novels including those by such well-known authors as John Fowles, A. S. Byatt, Graham Swift, and Mathew Kneale. This book discusses novels in which nineteenth-century science, including geology, paleontology, and evolutionary theory, interacts with religion through accommodations, confl icts, and crises of faith. In general, these texts abandon conventional religion but retain the ethical connectedness and celebration of life associated with spirituality at its best. Registering the growth of nineteenth-century secularism and drawing on aspects of the romantic tradition and ecological thinking, they honor the natural world without imagining that it exists for humans or functions in reference to human values. In particular, they enact a form of wonderment: the capacity of the mind to make sense of, creatively adapt, and enjoy the world out of which it has evolved—in short, to endow it with meaning. Protagonists who come to experience reality in this expansive way release themselves from self-anxiety and alienation. In this book, Glendening shows how, by intermixing past and present, fact and fiction, neo-Victorian narratives, with a few instructive exceptions, manifest this pattern. John Glendening is Professor in the Department of English at The University of Montana, US.

Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature

1 Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion ‘Our Feverish Contact’ Allan Conrad Christensen 2 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy Jean Fernandez 3 Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry F. Elizabeth Gray 4 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era Lara Baker Whelan 5 Antebellum American Women Writers and the Road American Mobilities Susan L. Roberson 6 Domesticity and Design in American Women’s Lives and Literature Stowe, Alcott, Cather, and Wharton Writing Home Caroline Hellman 7 The Textual Condition of Nineteenth-Century Literature Josephine Guy and Ian Small 8 Narrative Hospitality in Late Victorian Fiction Novel Ethics Rachel Hollander

9 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels Eye of the Ichthyosaur John Glendening

Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels Eye of the Ichthyosaur John Glendening

NEW YORK

LONDON

First published 2013 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Taylor & Francis The right of John Glendening to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Glendening, John. Science and religion in neo-Victorian novels : eye of the ichthyosaur / by John Glendening. pages cm. — (Routledge studies in nineteenth-century literature ; 9) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Science in literature. 2. Religion in literature. 3. English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 4. English fiction—21st century—History and criticism. 5. Historical fiction, English—History and criticism. 6. Natural history in literature. 7. Scientific expeditions in literature. 8. Literature and science—Great Britain. 9. Religion and science—Great Britain—History—19th century. 10. Great Britain— History—Victoria, 1837–1901—Historiography. I. Title. PR888.S34G58 2013 823'.9109356—dc23 2012046649 ISBN13: 978-0-415-81943-5 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-38323-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global.

For Kelly

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

1

Introduction

2

Reconstructing History: “The World-Renowned Ichthyosaurus”

31

3

Fossils and Faith: Remarkable Creatures, Ever After, and The Bone Hunter

55

Paradises Lost: The Voyage of the Narwhal and English Passengers

79

Evolution and the Uncrucified Jesus: The French Lieutenant’s Woman

109

6

True Romance: A. S. Byatt’s Possession and “Morpho Eugenia”

136

7

Devil’s Chaplain: This Thing of Darkness and Mr. Darwin’s Shooter

163

8

Victorians and Other Apes: Monkey’s Uncle and Ark Baby

186

9

Conclusion: Confessing a Murder and Love and the Platypus

213

Notes Works Cited Index

229 245 253

4

5

1

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Acknowledgments

For their suggestions and support I thank my colleagues and friends Robert Pack, Christopher Knight, Salah el Moncef, and Sean O’Brien. As always, I thank my wife, Jeanne, for her love and support. Most of section two of Chapter 6 is excerpted by permission of the publishers from The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels by John Glendening (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007). Copyright © 2007. The bulk of Chapter 2 is taken from my article “‘The World Renowned Ichthyosaurus’: A Nineteenth-Century Problematic and Its Representations” (Journal of Literature and Science 2 [2009]: 23–47; http:// literatureandscience.research.glam.ac.uk /media /files/documents/ 2009-09-30/JLS2.1GlendeningPDF.pdf). I thank JLS, which is part of the open access movement of academic and intellectual property, for its ready agreement to republish.

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1

Introduction

I Scores of neo-Victorian novels have been published since the 1960s. The work primarily of British novelists but also of authors from former British colonies, this form of historical fiction, also called retro-Victorian, reimagines the people, places, events, and trends of the nineteenth century from late twentieth- and early twenty-fi rst-century perspectives. Because of their popularity these novels have been a primary catalyst for neo-Victorian studies, which over the last fi fteen years has developed as a scholarly field concerned with the general phenomenon of neo-Victorianism: present-day manifestations and creative adaptations of nineteenth-century ideas, ideologies, practices, and aspects of material culture. Science and technology, politics and economics, ethics and religion, conduct and manners, art and literature, fashion and décor all have provided material for neo-Victorian studies.1 This book, however, addresses a subject that has been largely overlooked in neo-Victorian studies and in literary criticism of neo-Victorian fiction: the relationship between science and religion. Many neo-Victorian novels incorporate this topic that was of vital interest to Victorians and remains significant today. The engagement between science and religion informs some of the most popular and critically successful neo-Victorian novels as well as some relatively obscure ones. The following texts, which this book examines in varying degrees of detail, are relevant to this engagement: John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969); A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), “Morpho Eugenia” (from Angels and Insects, 1992) and The Biographer’s Tale (2000); Penelope Lively’s City of the Mind (1991); Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992); Julie Diski’s Monkey’s Uncle (1994); Liz Jensen’s Ark Baby (1998); Andrea Barrett’s The Voyage of the Narwhal (1998); Roger McDonald’s Mr. Darwin’s Shooter (1998); Mathew Kneale’s English Passengers (2000); Tom Holland’s The Bone Hunter (2001); Nicholas Drayson’s Confessing a Murder (2002) and Love and the Platypus (2007); Harry Thompson’s This Thing of Darkness (2005); and Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures (2010). Together these novels present a comprehensive reworking of

2

Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels

the nineteenth-century relationship between science and religion, creatively taking up subjects important in historiography and sometimes responding to matters largely forgotten. As neo-Victorian hybridizations of contemporary and Victorian ideas and materials, novels involved with the science-religion relationship also often draw on elements of the romantic tradition and ecological consciousness, applying them to an understanding of the human condition that dispenses with God but retains qualities traditionally associated with religion. There are exceptions—or partial exceptions in the case of narratives that represent the spiritual traditions of indigenous peoples—but overall these novels translate traditionally Christian ethics into secular contexts informed by life-affi rming concepts of natural reality. Despite awareness of its negative potential, they locate in science, and in biological science especially, rationales for mutually beneficial human and humane relationships and for individual self-determination. Not all of them equally pay respect to ethics and humanism, but to some degree they all do so, even when engaged in postmodern literary practices that often have been attached to anti-humanist attitudes. Novels adopting this perspective abandon conventional religion but retain, without recourse to divinity or the supernatural, the ethical connectedness and celebration of life that throughout history occasionally has transcended the constrictive aspects of religious dogma. Ultimately these novels honor the natural world—which in the broadest sense is the entire non-human cosmos—without imagining that it exists for humans or functions in reference to human values. In particular, neoVictorian fiction concerned with science and religion expresses a form of wonderment: the capacity of the mind to perceive, make sense of, creatively adapt, and enjoy the world out of which it has evolved—in short, to endow it with the meanings that make it most livable. Protagonists who experience the world in this expansive way largely escape self-anxiety and alienation. Most of the neo-Victorian novels that seriously take account of science and religion enact this dynamic.

II What is it about Victorians that makes them an inspiration for present-day literature? Victorians often have been criticized for, among other things, their supposed over-earnestness, but neo-Victorian novels often deal with matters of import in a way that suggests, sometimes with humor or playfulness, appreciation of the Victorian earnestness that seemed both dull and hypocritical to post-Victorian critics of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Even neo-Victorian novels that have fun with exaggerated moral seriousness or other stock Victorianisms display their attraction to something that, in contrast to today, seems real or authentic lying behind the energies, contradictions, self-satisfactions, and self-questionings of the

Introduction 3 Victorian era. Those novels that spotlight the science-religion relationship pose in particular the question of what in the rush of the modern or postmodern world really matters. They intimate that truth or authenticity might be rendered recognizable, if only dimly or provisionally, by disrupting standard understandings of past and present, fact and fiction, although sometimes the resulting truth threatens moral or intellectual discomfort. In Graham Swift’s 1992 novel Ever After Mathew Pierce looks into the eye of a fossilized ichthyosaur and sees himself and his Victorian world from an alien and discomforting perspective that relegates humans to a limited, tenuous place in the universe. Though Pierce’s fear and self-assertion undercut its potential, the experience also suggests, in Keats’s phrase, “negative capability”—the possibility of escape from the ego-involvement that separates the human and non-human. The historically revisionary novels discussed in this book afford such strange and potentially meaningful vantages from which to view history and the human condition. Sometimes Victorian fiction offers a model. Bill Unwin, the main character and narrator of Ever After, comes into possession of Mathew Pierce’s diary and learns that this Victorian ancestor, having lost his religious faith because of a questioning mind, the effects of studying geology and biology, and the death of a young son, fi nally also loses his wife and family because of his obstinate need to assert his newfound understanding. In Unwin’s words, the crisis begins when Pierce, having “come face-to-face with an ichthyosaur, on the cliffs of Dorset in the summer of 1844 . . . chose to stare into the eye of a monster” (99). Swift’s novel, the main subject of Chapter 3, echoes Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873). In Hardy’s novel, in a strongly contrived scene, the amateur geologist Henry Knight fi nds himself dangling from a Dorset cliff and staring into the eye, not of an ichthyosaur, but of a fossilized trilobite. Ichthyosaurs and trilobites were two of the most powerfully iconic fossils of the nineteenth century, one because of its size and status as the fi rst of the great extinct reptiles discovered in Britain, the other because of its prevalence in the fossil record, and both of them because of their bizarre appearance, the fact of being extinct, and Victorians’ enthusiasm for collecting fossils and other specimens of natural history. In Victorian times trilobites and ichthyosaurs were sufficiently well known so that in 1885 May Kimbell could publish “The Lay of the Trilobite” and “Ballad of the Ichthyosaurus” in Punch magazine and assume readers would possess enough scientific awareness to catch the humor as her speakers wittily lament the effects on them of evolution and extinction. In Hardy’s novel Henry Knight, trying to retrieve his hat that the wind had blown off, slips down a rocky slope and onto a massive cliff face to which he clings, unable to move, hundreds of feet above the ocean. Knight’s only hope is that Elfride, his companion and love interest standing above, somehow will provide or bring help—thereby reversing a traditional pattern: the knight is in distress and the damsel must do the saving.

4

Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels

In Knight’s terrifying and disorienting situation, by looking into the eye of an extinct creature he not only confronts his own mortality but recognizes a relationship with organic history that confusedly both expands his sense of self as a form of life and seems to reduce him, like dead individuals and species, to just another momentary and inconsequential fl icker in the immensity of time and space. In a typically playful turn, Hardy’s narrator calmly suggests the episode is “familiar,” whereas in fact it is powerfully defamiliarizing—but might seem more familiar if we shared Hardy’s sense of humanity’s relation to a vast and uncaring cosmos where only projections of our own knowledge and imagination allow us, if lucky, to fi nd connection and meaning: By one of those familiar conjunctions in which the inanimate world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of suspense, opposite Knight’s eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and turned to stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated by millions of years in their lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their death. It was the single instance within reach of his vision of anything that had ever been alive and had had a body to save, as he himself had now. (213) The fact of shared mortality connects Knight, not at all a knight in control of life’s adventure, to the defunct creature encased in stone, but Hardy spins out the episode into something more complex.2 Seeing the fossil and seeing it seeing him, Knight perceives himself also embedded and immobile in the grasp of time while at the same time imaginatively able to stand outside it. Prompted by geological knowledge and the imminence of death into an extraordinary imaginative response, he confronts the implications of his existence by rewinding the history of evolutionary development until both he and the trilobite share the same brief transcendent moment—one that viewed a certain way might seem fi lled with religious potential or the possibility of self-transformation: Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one extremity of the years, face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate centuries simultaneously. Fierce men, clothed in the hides of beasts, and carrying, for defence and attack, huge clubs and pointed spears, rose from the rock. . . . Behind them stood an earlier band. No man was there. Huge elephantine forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir, antelopes of monstrous size, the megatharium. . . . Farther back, and overlapped by these, were perched huge-billed birds and swinish creatures as large as horses. Still more shadowy were the sinister crocodilian outlines—alligators and other horrible reptiles, culminating in the colossal lizard, the iguanodon. Folded behind were fishy beings of

Introduction 5 lower development; and so, till the life-time scenes of the fossil confronting him were a present and modern condition of things.3 This vision, which “passed before Knight’s inner eye in less than half a minute” (214), culminates a century of geological and biological investigation that for many people revised entirely the human relationship to the material world and that for some, like Thomas Hardy, removed God as a comforting explanation for why we fi nd ourselves clinging precariously to the cliff face of transient existence. The neo-Victorian novels discussed in this book take up the matter of how Victorians and their immediate predecessors, and to some degree we ourselves, negotiate between science and religion, or perhaps grasp only one or the other, in seeking a fi rm hold amidst the contingencies and confusions of life. I will leave Knight hanging for the present, a suggestion of the human predicament of being a conscious and anxious species, a condition that has not changed between Victorian times and now.

III The remainder of this introductory chapter will further characterize the nature, background, and significance of neo-Victorian fiction and then return to this book’s central concern, the engagement between nineteenthcentury science and religion as adapted by neo-Victorian novels. They share with neo-Victorian studies in general a largely favorable view of Victorians and their society, fi nding in them attractive or interesting qualities that, when mixed with present-day revisionary attitudes and approaches, counteract what might seem dull or lacking or wrongheaded in today’s society. Some in this regard have turned to the Victorians for models of ethical behavior or of social responsibility and effectiveness.4 This positive stance reverses the attitude that prevailed throughout much of the twentieth century, when modernists in particular but much of the general public as well equated the Victorian era with character and social flaws including stuffiness, conventionality, literal-mindedness, authoritarianism, male chauvinism, self-righteousness, hypocrisy, jingoism, and prudery. Some still assign such characteristics to the period. Nevertheless, as the nineteenth century receded an adjustment occurred, accelerating in the latter part of the twentieth century, entailing a growing discernment of positive traits such as self-confidence, honesty, hard work, commitment to family, and social responsibility. This more affi rmative position, however, has been mitigated by acknowledgement, strengthening throughout the twentieth century, of nineteenth-century prejudices and their legacy regarding class, race, gender, and sexuality. Also increasingly recognized has been the insecurity and lack of confidence that many Victorians felt, and more so as the century approached its end, because of political and economic

6

Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels

disruptions, unsettling scientific discoveries and theories, and unrelenting social and environmental change. Therefore sophisticated expressions of neo-Victorianism in both its creative and critical-scholarly aspects display a more balanced response to Victorian material than once prevailed while retaining respect for their subject. Respect, if not always approval, had already been stimulated by Victorian studies, which arose around the middle of the twentieth century.5 Before the emergence of neo-Victorian studies this field likewise struggled to defi ne its operant word. Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn claim that “the idea of how to defi ne ‘the Victorian’ is an essential question to be addressed in a book on neo-Victorianism in the twenty-fi rst century” (3).6 The many reasons advanced for the neo-Victorian phenomenon suggest, if nothing else, that too many factors and too much indeterminacy are involved for any simple explanation to suffice. British nostalgia for a contrasting time of imagined stability and political, economic, and cultural dominance might explain part of it, with Americans perhaps vicariously participating because of a similar sense of insecurity and falling off from former greatness. But for many Victorians social, aesthetic, and intellectual issues mattered more than they do today, and that sense of seriousness, mentioned earlier, also exercises a source of attraction for an age that often seems unfocused or frivolous. If Victorian seriousness does attract, then even Victorian intellectual and spiritual crises possess an allure founded not on escaping into other people’s problems but on admiring the gravity and even competence with which Victorians sometimes acknowledged and tried to address social problems. I believe Sally Shuttleworth gets at part of the truth in her discussion of the Darwinian revolution as indicative of a generalized Victorian “crisis of faith”: “Many of the retro-Victorian texts are informed by a sense of loss . . . of that . . . immediacy and urgency which comes with true existential crisis. We look back nostalgically not to an age of safe belief . . . but rather to a point of crisis. It is the intensity of emotion and authenticity of experience at that moment which we long to recapture” (“Natural” 260; emphasis original).7 But I suspect that the general popularity of neo-Victorianism does to a degree involve longing for “an age of safe belief,” a sense of solidity seemingly present in Victorian middle-class lives and material reality, and that many neo-Victorian novels draw on that longing. Still, that cannot be the whole story, and there is no reason why Shuttleworth’s explanation cannot also apply since motivations can be contradictory and varied. Similarities as well as differences, however, must be part of the explanation, since there are many parallels between the Victorian and contemporary world regarding social complexities and disorienting social changes, with enough time having elapsed to cause resemblances to stand out in the midst of historical differences. Marie-Luise Kohlke, for example, recognizes a current trend in neo-Victorian writing, both fiction and non-fiction, that conceives “the nineteenth century as a harbinger of our own trauma

Introduction 7 culture”: “Increasingly, the period is configured as a temporal convergence of multiple historical traumas. . . . These include . . . social ills, such as disease, crime, and sexual exploitation, and the more spectacular traumas of violent civil unrest, international confl icts, and trade wars.” As an example she cites Mathew Kneale’s English Passengers and its recording of the extermination of native Tasmanians (Kohlke 7, 8). Therefore she identifies a progressive political agenda: “neo-Victorian trauma writing . . . is actively involved in consciousness-raising and witness-bearing. As such it directly counters and contests charges of de-politicisation, based on a decadent sentimentalism, nostalgia, or spurious liberalism sometimes attributed to the Neo-Victorian project” (9).8 Heilmann and Llewellyn justly point out that historical fiction set in Victorian times is not necessarily “progressive” and that it can “deliver a stereotypical and unnuanced reading of the Victorians and their literature and culture”: genuine neo-Victorian fiction they claim is “about the metahistorical and metafictional ramifications of . . . historical engagement” (6). Nevertheless, the novels treated in this book qualify as progressive or “consciousness-raising,” even though they sometimes confront social injustice more by simply representing what today most fi nd objectionable than through overt polemicism. Furthermore, in part because of their commitment to the telling of transhistorical ethical truths, they suggest that the partial recapturing of the past is possible, rejecting extremist postmodernist claims about its irretrievability or indeterminacy. As Kate Mitchell says about neo-Victorian novels in general, that while they show “a vivid awareness of the problematics involved in seeking and achieving historical knowledge, [they] remain nonetheless committed to the possibility and the value of striving for that knowledge. They are more concerned with the ways in which fiction can lay claim to the past . . . than the ways that it can not” (3; emphasis original). Confidence in the possibility of telling the truth about Victorian history and culture, without which neo-Victorian concern with social justice is pointless, particularly informs neo-Victorian novels concerning science and religion because of their involvement with matters of truth and value. In acknowledging, re-creating, and critiquing historical similarities and differences, the neo-Victorian novel over the last quarter-century has become popular, in Britain especially but throughout the English-speaking world, as its identity has coalesced and its sense of creative possibilities expanded. Among the many texts falling within this category are works by such popular and critically respected authors, mostly British but successful on both sides of the Atlantic, as Jean Rhys, John Fowles, J. G. Farrell, Penelope Fitzgerald, Angela Carter, A. S Byatt, Peter Ackroyd, Peter Carey, Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, Colm Tóibín, and Sarah Waters. As with neo-Victorianism in general, neo-Victorian novels re-imagine the nineteenth century in Britain and occasionally elsewhere in the Empire or in America. They also sometimes revise the Victorian novel itself in subject

8

Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels

matter, plots, themes, characters, and writing styles. But whether or not directed at Victorian forms of fiction, the neo-Victorian revisionary process necessarily involves changes in style and content from what would have been fully conceivable for Victorian authors. These changes can be seen to draw the Victorian past into a contemporary perspective (neo-) or, much the same thing, look back at that past from a present-day vantage (retro-), producing forms of historical and artistic hybridity that sometimes involve disjunctive or unbalanced rather than smoothly blended qualities. A trickle of neo-Victorian novels appeared in the twenty years following their fi rst manifestations in the 1960s, but it was not until the late 1980s that the genre came fully into its own. That the fi nal decade or so of the twentieth century witnessed a florescence of neo-Victorian novels—which until the late 1990s lacked a generic label and a clear awareness of shared identity that produces one—is intelligible in part because of unease, similar to that of many late Victorians, that was felt as a millennial perspective from which to look forward and back trained attention on the human costs and the sustainability of scientific and technological development along with its capitalistic incentives and payoffs. The success of the genre involves more than concern with just nineteenth-century science and religion, but it is understandable that the fi rst wave of neo-Victorian novels, a sort of delayed reaction to precursor texts of the 1960s, responded to its own historical moment not only by taking up the impact of science at a time of growing concern about environmental degradations, economic instability, and the effects on human happiness of relentless drives toward productivity and globalism, but also by reviewing parallels with an earlier, well-documented age that likewise witnessed and recorded blows to its self-confidence. The sense of disorientation and lack of directedness associated with our time intermingles with these causes of concern. Commentators often have identified postmodernism as the determining perspective and source of the changes that neo-Victorian novels work on Victorian modes and meanings. Sally Shuttleworth, commenting in 1998 on what already seemed a “deluge of Victorian-centered novels . . . being published in the British Isles,” notes that these texts, which she labels “retro-Victorian,” “generally display an informed post-modern self-consciousness in their interrogation of the relationship between fiction and history” while displaying “an absolute, non-ironic, fascination with the details of the period, and with our relations to it” (“Natural” 253). In 1997 Dana Shiller, the fi rst to apply the term “neo-Victorian” to novels, defi ned them as “those novels that adopt a postmodern approach to history and that are set at least partly in the nineteenth century. This capacious umbrella includes texts that revise specific Victorian precursors, texts that imagine new adventures for familiar Victorian characters, and ‘new’ Victorian fictions that imitate nineteenth-century literary conventions” (558n1). Novels that conform to these defi nitions generally fit Linda Hutcheon’s influential 1988 presentation of what she calls “historiographic metafiction”: postmodern novels

Introduction 9 “which are both intensely self-reflective and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (5). The characteristics advanced by these critics—metafictional selfawareness, the problematizing of history by reinterpretation and revision, signification of the uncertain boundaries between fact and fiction, and immersion in the very historical trends and details being revised— describe the postmodern intellectual or philosophical disposition of much neo-Victorian fiction. Tactically, such novels variously employ simulation, satire, parody, pastiche, or some combination thereof in ways that signal both involvement in an earlier age and separation from it. Neo-Victorian novels sometimes exercise a postmodern playfulness that liberation from rules and conventional epistemologies and pieties tends to release. Some of the novels discussed in this book display even more of these qualities than does neo-Victorian fiction in general—as if the seemingly hyper-serious subjects of science and religion, and of both in combination, particularly lend themselves to deflations—while still taking seriously matters of justice and human happiness. In effecting moral opposition to nineteenth-century prejudices and victimizations, neo-Victorian novels, especially those dealt with here, align themselves with reformist Victorian authors—Carlyle, Mill, Dickens, E. B. Browning, Eliot, Ruskin, Arnold, Morris, and many more—who in similar and different ways struck “anti-Victorian” stances to what they perceived as objectionable aspects of their social and political world. Neo-Victorian commitments cut against relativistic postmodern dubiety about humanistic ideals and suggest that generally agreed upon postmodern literary practices can stand postmodern skepticism on its head by being skeptical about skepticism. According to some theorists and cultural critics we live in a postmodern world, but the concept is so amorphous and inclusive that novels with postmodern aspects can embrace qualities that in themselves seem anything but postmodern. One of these characteristics is recognition, displayed particularly in the novels I will be discussing, that human beings exhibit inherent, evolutionarily influenced behaviors and dispositions that constitute human nature, and that these, though shaped by society, are not entirely socially constructed as postmodernism in its more radical formulations has claimed. Elisabeth Wesseling in fact doubts that postmodernism in practice is nearly as radical as imagined by critics who fi nd it “nonreferential, ahistorical, apolitical, self-reflexive, and devoid of any sort of commitment whatsoever except to its own autonomy”; according to Wesseling, many successful “postmodern” authors write novels that are politically, ethically, and historically engaged (5, 6). If this is true, it is even more true of neo-Victorian novelists with postmodern literary orientations. As a whole the genre of the neo-Victorian novel, as a number of critics have noted, has never been philosophically committed to postmodernism; in envisioning the past it often employs postmodern approaches, but these often are creatively absorbed by realist conventions such as

10

Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels

narrative authority, plausibility, coherence, and closure. This sense of the neo-Victorian genre, which emerged in tandem with its recognition and naming in the mid-1990s, can be understood in light of a general British literary resistance to postmodernist thought even more prevalent today than it was in the late twentieth century. In 1994 Beate Neumeier already identified “the often articulated anti-relativistic critical impetus of contemporary British literature . . . based on the connection of experimental techniques and realist conventions,” an impetus she associates with “the return to narration and ethics.”9 Furthermore, although not referring to neo-Victorian fiction per se, she points out that “this return . . . relates to a growing literary interest in dealing with the cultural past, either with historical periods, events or individuals, or with literary genres, single fictional texts or literary figures” (“Engendering” 1). More recently, Louisa Hadley argues that “[w]hile neo-Victorian fiction is historically contemporaneous with postmodernism . . . most neo-Victorian texts eschew the conclusions of postmodernism” (19). Literary approaches promoted by postmodernism, but not its “conclusions,” are common in neo-Victorian fiction regarding “narration and ethics.” Some neo-Victorian novels, especially those that attempt to reproduce Victorian novels, reject postmodern attitudes and tactics altogether; according to Peter Preston, these “do not content themselves merely with nineteenth-century settings and subject-matter, but also seek to appropriate the structures, styles and thematic material that characterize ‘real’ Victorians novels,” although “their use of realist modes is inevitably modified by the developments in fiction over the past century or more,” including, at times, postmodernism (99). Preston discusses Jack Maggs, Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), and Sarah Waters’s Affi nity (1999) as examples of this ambitiously imitative sub-genre (99–104). So to my earlier characterization of neo-Victorian novels I will add that in adopting or hybridizing the legacy of the nineteenth century they generally display postmodern literary but not philosophical tendencies.10 Nevertheless, they do often show themselves self-aware about the problems of representing history as they combine an intellectually and dramatically compelling Victorian world with elements of the present-day one and, in the process, reveal that the past persists in the present despite their frequent stress on historical difference. I included the qualifier “generally” because I do not want to exclude from the neo-Victorian genre historical fiction that, though set in the nineteenth century, displays slight evidence of postmodern practices but nevertheless re-imagines the Victorian past through a combination of contemporary historical knowledge and fictive creativity. It is perhaps best to think of “neo-Victorian” as covering a spectrum, with awareness of how the present shapes understanding of the past prevalent but varying in the degree to which it operates to confuse and revise the relationship between present and past and between fiction and historical truth as generally conceived.

Introduction 11 All historical fiction, however, registers some difference between when it is written and the period written about; even novels trying to mimic “the Victorian novel” disclose their differences by how they present information needed to entertain or orient a current reading public within the details of another time. Already in the early nineteenth century some novels were not only fi xated upon historical differences but alert enough to their own fictionality to foreshadow aspects of the historiographic metafiction associated with the neo-Victorian novel. Walter Scott, generally considered the founder of the historical novel, employs narrators or narrative voices, sometimes ironically distanced from romantic protagonists, sensitive to the instabilities of writing about the past from a later historical standpoint as well as of their stories’ status as fiction despite the mass of historical details they impart. While not rejecting the postmodern component, Louisa Hadley argues that both neo-Victorian novels and Victorian historical novels “work within the conventions of the ‘classic historical novel’ as defi ned by [Georg] Lukács” in The Theory of the Novel and established by Scott (17). Nineteenth-century realism itself, which both modernism and postmodernism are thought to undermine, has been theoretically reconceived, at least regarding its more sophisticated instances, as not naïvely believing in the possibility of direct and unmediated access to reality, historical or otherwise, but instead savvy about the problems of representation.10 Yet neither Scott’s historical attempts at verisimilitude nor nineteenthcentury realism focused on its own time show enough fictional self-awareness or skepticism about the accessibility of an independent reality to allow close identification with postmodern novels. Literary genres and modes are open and leaky containers, and how well they receive or contain specific texts is a matter of degree: categorical uncertainties, inexactitude, and overlapping similar to those that task biological taxonomy always occur. Still, the neo-Victorian novel in its most characteristic form achieves a degree of generic coherence by foregrounding the malleability of historical interpretation so that readers, especially those familiar with current trends in fiction, detect some degree of self-questioning and history-questioning acts and gestures. In several ways neo-Victorian novels attach themselves to and re-create their Victorian subject matter as it has been shaped by both historians and popular understanding. The most obvious examples are novels such as Graham Swift’s Ever After and A. S. Byatt’s Possession in which Victorian narratives are juxtaposed with or fi ltered through present-day ones. Generically more problematic is an example like Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (2007), in which resonances, beginning with its title, of Mathew Arnold’s famous poem responding to the loss of religious faith, “Dover Beach” (1867), recur as commentary on the lives of its twentieth-century protagonists.11 But it can be debated whether this novel warrants the label “neo-Victorian”—whether the reverberations of Victorian concerns and narratives are pronounced enough for that. Here again arises the “matter

12

Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels

of degree” issue; genres are nominalistic terms of convenience, not reflections of a natural order existing prior to human understanding. Whether or not part of the narrative is set in later times, a neo-Victorian novel rewrites Victorian materials. This can be done with actual historical figures or events; with fictional characters, story lines, or episodes from Victorian fiction; or with authors’ writing styles. In addition to its double narrative, Possession broadly revises Robert Browning’s character and life, whereas Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1998) re-creates and brings together both Charles Dickens and Dickens’s own character of Magwitch from Great Expectations (1861). Common also has been the tactic of giving voice or at least attention to those whom Victorian values or vested interests once held in obscurity or forced into silence. This can occur with historical personages, such as the protagonists of Roger McDonald’s Mr. Darwin’s Shooter and Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures, who in their lives and historical treatment illustrate the drawbacks of being lower class or female. The subject of Chevalier’s novel, fossil hunter Mary Anning, who beginning in 1811 discovered the fi rst specimens of ichthyosaurs, recently has benefited from corrections of biased history.12 Sometimes entirely fictional characters can represent a group of the once un- or misrepresented, as do the lesbian characters in Sarah Waters’s novels. Some neo-Victorian fiction, like that of McDonald and Chevalier, takes the form of biographical novels based, at times very loosely, on the lives of actual people; other examples are The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983) by Peter Ackroyd, True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) by Peter Carey, and The Master (2004) by Colm Tóibín. There are many others. Fiction and historiography differ—they have different intentions—even though, wittingly or not, each necessarily entails elements of the other. Neo-Victorian novels, sometimes by design, frequently bear loose allegiance to historical accuracy, though knowledge of conventionally accepted historical fact—“the reservoir of established historical fact and standard interpretation of these facts” that Elisabeth Wesseling calls “canonized history” (93)—is the starting point for thinking about how they function and appreciating their accomplishment. As noted, they run a gamut in rewriting the past. On one end of the spectrum are narratives that do relatively little to complicate the relationship between historical fact and fiction because realist conventions are largely maintained once a forthright, overall fictional dimension is presented. In this respect they are not greatly different from what Scott does in fictionalizing history, placing his characters in the midst of historical actions and sometimes in connection to historical figures, like Richard Lionheart or Bonnie Prince Charlie, or re-creating the life of a real person as in his biographical novel Rob Roy (1817). The difference here is that neo-Victorian fiction offers a present-day rather than early nineteenth-century frame of reference and the shifts in interest and emphasis that difference entails; one of these shifts is a greater awareness of the problem of historical truth-telling.

Introduction 13 At the other end of the spectrum are novels employing postmodern literary tactics that vigorously direct attention at how they impose the present on the past and unsettle points of view from which it can be perceived. Liz Jensen’s Ark Baby imagines a twenty-fi rst-century infertility plague as a focus of contemporary anxieties and then, within that frame of reference, establishes its connections to a mid-Victorian world involving such fanciful matters as Queen Victoria’s collection of clothes-wearing stuffed mammals, ape-human sex, a Victorian sanitarium for clergymen driven mad by Darwinism, and a cameo celebrity appearance by Darwin at a celebration of evolution thrown by Queen Victoria. The novel hybridizes the past with present-day attitudes and concerns, mixes fact and fiction, and generally indulges in its freedom of spirit—although, like most other neo-Victorian novels that treat science and religion, it adapts its postmodernisms to matters its takes seriously. Because they can be broadly revisionary, authorship of neo-Victorian novels does not require profound knowledge of Victorian matters; some novelists, like A. S. Byatt and Sarah Waters, show themselves intimately acquainted with their Victorian subjects, while others appear less so. The results of study and research, however, are particularly evident in those novels dealing with science and religion. The closer novels approach realism and the expectations it raises, the more bothersome historical infidelity becomes for some readers. In general the character of neo-Victorian novels as revisionary historical fiction allows much latitude as they engage and alter generally agreed upon historical reality as well as indulging in areas of uncertainty or debate. Furthermore, because the Victorian material they treat is for the most part historically distanced, they usually do not raise ethical concerns of the sort that plague representations of more ideologically charged or recent phenomena such as the Holocaust, the Iraq War, or the lives of notable people alive or not long deceased. Their treatments of class, gender, sexuality, colonialism, or evolution might provoke some readers, but their inclination toward liberal politics fits much of their readership. Neo-Victorian novels especially encourage freedom in subject matter and its handling consistent with the openness of postmodern fiction. There are many neo-Victorian ways of rewriting or destabilizing the past. One is simply emphasizing matters of more concern today than they were in Victorian times or at least in mainstream Victorian life and publications. As I have noted, neo-Victorian fiction consistently attends to matters of justice involving class, race, gender, and sexuality. These categories important for present-day cultural and literary studies overlap concern with Victorian religion and science, where ideas of morality and of objective investigation and analysis, however imperfect in operation and confused or antagonistic in interaction, ultimately served to question more than support ideologies and social formations based on biased understandings of human cultural and physical differences. Though sometimes appearing postmodern in their skepticism about transhistorical truth claims or

14

Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels

metanarratives, neo-Victorian novels generally inherit the nineteenth-century spirit of reform based upon social justice. The sheer weight of their attention to Victorian discriminations and exploitations, and by extension those of today, goes beyond mere questioning to implicit, and occasionally explicit, critiques based on ideals of equality and fairness. This is just one of the many uses these novels make of history as they reconstruct it with greater and lesser amounts of creativity and adherence to generally agreed upon historical fact. Mixtures of fact and fiction in neo-Victorian novels can be subtle or pronounced, even wrenching, thus posing provocative epistemological problems or puzzles. These problems are often intensified when neo-Victorian novels take account of science and religion. Because of the ongoing and universal impact of science coupled with its ability to create sudden change and disrupt history; because of religion’s continuing relevance due of its attempts, like science in its most heroic modes, to locate the true and eternal in the face of the relative and transient; and because the Victorian era in these and other respects resonates so strongly with the present—for these reasons neo-Victorian novelists took up the relationship of Victorian science and religion as one of their fi rst orders of business.

IV As essential concepts intertwined with virtually every aspect of culture and history, “science” and “religion” have elicited many and varied defi nitions, all of them subject to objections. I defi ne science as the investigation of material reality—of matter and energy—through empiricism, logic, and the experimental and predictive capabilities they entail, and religion as systems of belief and practice that attempt, via supernatural agencies, to transcend material reality.13 Thus defi ned, these approaches to human reality are largely distinct conceptually, but in application and expression, in society and in individual minds, they overlap in complicated ways. The form of religion of greatest neo-Victorian interest is, of course, Christianity along with its incorporations of the Hebrew Bible; henceforth this is what I will mean by “religion” unless, as in the case of novels involving nonWestern spiritual traditions, I extend its usage. The most relevant forms of science are biology, geology, and paleontology because, particularly in the nineteenth century, these had the most impact on religion and its central concern of how humans are to understand their place in the order of things; consequently, they are the sciences with which neo-Victorian novels are most involved. Astronomy might seem applicable, but through its capacity to signify order and infi nitude, qualities ascribable to God, its relation to religion became less troublesome once it abandoned geocentrism; neo-Victorian novels give it little attention. The nascent Victorian human sciences of physical and cultural anthropology are part of the story, however, since

Introduction 15 in their early stages they were markedly permeated with Western religious and other cultural premises, many of them supportive of racism, a concern especially of neo-Victorian fiction set outside of Britain. For the novels featured in this study, and probably also in the minds of today’s educated reading public, it is the challenge of science to religion that delivered one of the greatest blows to Victorian self-confidence, with Charles Darwin as focal or flash point. Biology assumes a central role in representing the sometimes vexed relationship between Victorian science and religion, as do the geology and early stages of paleontology that paved the way for and underwrote Darwinian theory. Some of the neo-Victorian novels focused on science and religion concern or touch upon “the Higher Criticism”—use by nineteenth-century biblical scholars of the scientific ideals of objectivity and empiricism that served to question the historical accuracy of the Old and New Testaments.14 Neo-Victorian novels fictionalize Victorians’ reactions to the science that, at its most positive, seemed to enhance comfort and efficiency, to alleviate social problems, and to support a God-sanctioned spirit of progress, but that also eroded the foundations of religious belief for those who took seriously but could not reach a compromise between the two realms of knowing. Knowing something of the relationship between Victorian science and religion is important for understanding and appreciating the neo-Victorian fiction that responds to it. The relationship appeared increasingly complicated as twentieth-century scholars scoured and questioned the historical record concerning the nineteenth-century science-religion connection, doing so with lessening deference to tradition throughout the second half of the twentieth century. While the general public and some historians still believe the relationship was overwhelmingly conflictive, most recent historians have rejected that idea. They do not deny that considerable conflicts arose, nor that the era provoked crises of faith in many believers. Nevertheless, they attack what they see as exaggerations of these ideas arising largely from distorted interpretations by late nineteenth-century scholars wedded to triumphalist notions of science supported by Whiggish history and hostility toward perceived religious interference with the march of scientific progress.15 “For nearly a century, the notion of mutual hostility . . . has been routinely employed in popular-science writing, by the media, and in a few older histories of science . . . it has proven extremely hard to dislodge” (Russell 4). According to its critics, the confl ict model leans too heavily on a few historical episodes that have been distorted and blown out of proportion, chief among them the Galileo affair, negative Christian reaction to Darwin’s theory of evolution, and, in twentieth-century America, the Scopes trial. Those rejecting the science vs. religion position argue that not only were these episodes historically atypical in some ways but that none involved a direct, unmediated clash between science and religion but rather were complicated by political and social factors along with the personalpsychological dispositions of its chief participants.

16 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels Evidence abounds for a variety of nineteenth-century relationships between science and religion involving conflict, accommodation, and mixtures of the two.16 For example, despite the controversies that the 1859 publication of On The Origin of Species stirred up, some religious acceptance of its ideas and evidence appeared almost immediately, though rarely regarding natural selection since the apparent randomness of individual variations underlying the process was hard to reconcile with a divinely inspired natural order.17 Exemplifying accommodation, theistic evolution imagined God as somehow directing the evolutionary process and enlisted Darwinian ideas, though usually not natural selection, to support a progressive, teleological universe broadly consistent with Christian belief. The related quasi-religious notion of vitalism informed the influential philosophical system of Herbert Spencer as well as the neo-Lamarckism that, reliant upon notions of innate biological progressivism and acquired characteristics, in the late nineteenth century threatened Darwin’s explanation for evolutionary change. In various forms synergy between science and religion was part of a long tradition that continued throughout the 1800s. Certainly late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rationalism sometimes served to validate science and marginalize religion, and strains of British radicalism aligned with the working class continued that tradition into the nineteenth century as did the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and his followers and, a little later, the positivism of Auguste Comte. For a while, however, rationalism seemed to support and refi ne the claims of natural theology, which long served as a conduit for science-religion accommodation even though critics saw it as a threat to Bible-based Christianity. Founded on the belief, an old one in Western civilization, that the character of the universe reveals the existence and nature of God, and strengthened by the discoveries by Newton and others of universal laws of energy, matter, and motion, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries natural theology produced evidence for this position based more on observation of the physical world and less on biblical understanding than had previously obtained. Natural theology was sometimes seen to uphold a deistic understanding of God’s distanced, hands-off relation to the world, but it could also be made to accommodate belief in a God intimately involved in the workings of nature; his ongoing influence and care could be read everywhere in the book of nature by rational and observant people. Natural history—the traditional term for the biological sciences but focused especially on observing and collecting—supported natural theology by identifying anatomical and behavioral details of organisms, as well as their relationship to each other and to their environments, that readily could be ascribed to the handiwork and benevolence of a rational God. For nineteenth-century Britain the most important purveyor of this idea was William Paley (1743–1805) and his elaborations of “the argument from design”—often referenced in neo-Victorian novels dealing with science and religion—which holds that the contrivances, adaptations, and

Introduction 17 intricate interactions of nature, especially organic nature, display overwhelming evidence of design that presupposes the existence of an all-seeing, all-powerful designer; Paley’s knowledge of natural history allowed him to cite many examples. This idea persists today in America under the label of “intelligent design,” which dismisses evolutionary theory and especially Darwinian evolution with its demonstration of design without a designer. In early nineteenth-century Britain, when natural historians were often clergymen and other pious amateurs who tended to see mutual support between science and religion rather than contradiction, Paley’s writings were well known and featured in the curriculum at Cambridge, which like Oxford was a religious institution and a traditional training ground for the Anglican priesthood. In early life Darwin was a fan of Paley’s writings, his knowledge of which allowed him to pass a crucial exam at Cambridge at a time he seemed destined for Anglican priesthood. In The Origin of Species, however, Darwin overtly challenges the design argument, including the problem of how complex organs such as the eye, which Paley uses as an evidentiary centerpiece, could arise without divine involvement. The Origin also takes on and dismisses the idea of serial special creations in which the appearance in the fossil record of new species results from God’s repeated and ongoing interventions in nature and history. This form of creationism illustrates attempted religious harmonization with science since it moves away from a literal reading of Genesis in order to accommodate geological and paleontological evidence of creative activity in nature that surpasses what can be explained by six literal days of divine activity. Darwin’s theory of evolution via natural selection contradicted some religious uses of natural history and provoked harsh denunciations on scientific as well as religious bases, but, as noted, these reactions were far from universal—they are part of the larger, complicated picture of science and religion. Victorians certainly experienced crises of faith, either in painfully overcoming challenges to belief or in giving up religion and sometimes mourning its passing, and many of these fraught experiences predated The Origin of Species. Geology had been a potent source of religious unease and occasional crises since the beginning of the century. In the early part of the 1800s, however, “Mosaic” or biblical geology, concerned with demonstrating how science upholds the Old Testament and vice versa, held sway in Britain, but gradually as the field became more professionalized geology distanced itself from Bible-related concerns, and especially from how to reconcile the Genesis stories of creation and Noah’s flood with physical evidence. This is not to say that many geologists became religious skeptics—and efforts continued by some geologists as well as many others to show the compatibility of science and religion—but increasingly they abandoned attempts to support biblical literalism and let naturalistic evidence and explanations speak for themselves. A problem, however, for many was that geological and paleontological evidence for an ancient earth and the repeated emergence and

18

Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels

extinction of many life forms yielded a view of the world that not only fit poorly with the Bible but seemed to diminish the centrality of humanity in the scheme of things, a diminution that to a degree already had occurred spatially through astronomy’s demonstration of a vast universe in which the earth was not the center but only a marginal speck—though, as I have said, astronomy was far less problematic for religion than geology, paleontology, and evolutionary theory. Especially as widely disseminated by the three volumes of Charles Lyell’s The Principles of Geology (1830–33), geology spread the idea of an inconceivably ancient earth. Perhaps in conjunction with Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), Lyell’s work helped create the existential anguish Tennyson records in the middle sections of his massively popular In Memoriam (1849), where an ancient earth conspires with evidence of mass extinctions to reduce humans to the imagined future fossils of just one more extinct species. John Ruskin’s oft-quoted mid-century lament encapsulates geology’s challenge to religion: “If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses” (Letter to Henry Acland, May 24, 1851; Works 36:115). As promulgated especially by Georges Buffon (1707–88), Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), and Robert Chambers (1802–71), evolutionary theory in the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, prior to the publication of the Origin, was already raising troubling questions about the status of humans. The fi rst remains of prehistoric humans that began showing up at mid-century intensified this trend. As background for neo-Victorian novels dealing with science and religion, Chapter 2, by focusing its discussion on the culturally resonant subject of ichthyosaurs, will illustrate the kind of challenges geology, paleontology, and evolutionary theory posed for Victorian believers. Nineteenth-century secularism, however, involved more than just scientific challenges to religion and religious institutions, whether they were directly attacked or merely neglected as irrelevant. Some historians, for example, argue that the most important objection to religion was that its adherents and institutions, especially the Anglican Church, all too often ignored the poor and disadvantaged they were supposed to help; this criticism turned some away from conventional or institutional religion. This description applies to Charles Dickens and to many lesser-known social critics. Discussing an array of factors antipathetic to religious belief in his provocatively entitled God’s Funeral (1999), its title taken from a poem by Thomas Hardy, A. N. Wilson concentrates on a period between 1850 and 1900 “when the human race in Western Europe began to discard Christianity” because of “the Victorian disease, Doubt” (4, 8).18 Wilson concentrates on Victorian doubt in a way that might seem to reinforce the simplistic science vs. religion model, although he goes out of his way to reject it (192, 202). In investigating the decline of religious belief that marked the second

Introduction 19 half of nineteenth-century Britain and continued throughout the twentieth, Wilson concentrates on what contributed to this trend including science in its non-accommodating forms; whether he should have given more attention to non-confl ictive interactions is open to question. Along with discussion of influential atheists who in some cases had no religion to lose in the fi rst place, he supplies, as many had done before, examples of religious crises in prominent Victorian lives while leaving uncertain how prevalent such episodes were in the general population. Understandably—because confl icts have more dramatic appeal than accommodations—neo-Victorian novels interested in the science-religion connection make much use of the crisis of faith idea that has been so important for historiography and popular culture even as they sometimes resist depicting the relationship as a simple clash between opposite, antagonistic forces. As often psychologically and socially astute creative responses to history, they usually, at least in their less satiric modes, steer clear of black-white explanations of human conflict and make some allowance for the complexity of Victorian beliefs. Neo-Victorian novels sometimes respond to Victorian beliefs that have problematic relationships to both science and religion, especially those involving occultism and what today are considered forms of pseudoscience. Among such enthusiasms are physiognomy and phrenology, once treated as respectable scientific disciplines; mesmerism and animal magnetism, which in the form of hypnosis have a scientific basis but were little understood and often misrepresented at the time; clairvoyance and telepathy, mental powers some thought based on scientific principles not yet understood; and spiritualism, the ability to communicate with or otherwise manifest the dead, an activity that for most people seemed either unrelated or opposed to science.19 Spiritualism became especially controversial as its popularity grew throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Most scientists rejected it, as did many non-scientists, because it seemed beyond the reach of scientific proof or because mediums were often exposed as charlatans. Traditional religious organizations were particularly hostile because it had little or no connection to Christian theology apart from shared belief in the afterlife. Nevertheless, spiritualism can be viewed as a sort of substitute or supplemental religion reacting against the scientific rationalism and materialism that helped call Christian dogma into question. Phrenology, mesmerism, and other practices and belief systems with complicated or suspect connections to both science and religion appear prominently or marginally in many neo-Victorian novels, including some of those discussed in this book. Possession, Angels and Insects, and Ark Baby take account of spiritualism. Fiction and historiography often present Victorian occultism as contrary or threatening to traditional religion, but it shared the fate of Christianity in twentieth-century Britain as an increasing spirit of secularism eroded interest in the unprovable. Today Britain is largely secular and by some accounts the least religious European nation. It is clear that the percentage of people attending church

20

Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels

steadily fell over the last century and a half, probably more the result of growing indifference about religious matters than of clear commitments to agnosticism or atheism. Now as in Victorian times intellectuals, social critics, and creative writers are more likely to reject religion than the general public; in fact, the religious crises or un-conversions of prominent Victorian writers, including Carlyle, Tennyson, Eliot, Darwin, Ruskin, and Hardy, perhaps have given somewhat historically undue weight to the idea of a Victorian crisis of faith. The spirit of liberalism prevalent among present-day British academics and creative writers, bolstered by historical awareness including that of the complicity of putative Christians in numerous historical outrages, would seem to tilt neo-Victorian novelists in the direction of unbelief. As far as I can tell, most indeed are either non-religious or adverse to religion as conventionally understood, although there are notable exceptions among those involved in the science-religion issue. Whatever the dispositions of the authors, in general they treat religion neither simplistically nor disrespectfully—although exceptions occur here as well. The nineteenth century, then, both as construed by historians and as rendered in neo-Victorian fiction, discloses a complicated relationship between science and religion—hostilities, accommodations, confusions—that tap into basic human hopes and fears while overlapping politics, economics, education, and other spheres of societal activity and understanding. Controversy continues about the relationship between the two. Some claim they are fundamentally different areas of knowledge, what Stephen Jay Gould has called “nonoverlapping magisteria” (Leonardo’s 269–83), and therefore can leave one another alone; others, such as the “new atheists” including Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, identify fundamental and contradictory differences and claim science simply invalidates religion, which they believe has caused great harm; still others see no necessary separation. These contemporary positions largely reproduce nineteenth-century ones, although today there is more scientific knowledge to embrace, refute, or ignore. 20 Historical knowledge of the science-religion connection is important for understanding both the nineteenth century and the palette of Victorian and contemporary options neo-Victorian novels draw from in their hybridized renditions of the past and, directly or indirectly, the present.

V Up to now there have been no sustained studies of neo-Victorian fictionalizations of science and religion or of religion alone. Daniel Candel Bormann’s The Articulation of Science in the Neo-Victorian Novel (2002), however, represents a detailed interdisciplinary effort “to provide a poetics of the articulation of science in the neo-Victorian novel by analyzing two case studies”—Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) and A. S. Byatt’s Possession—by means of “two hypotheses” and “two constraints” that he feels

Introduction

21

address the complexities of dealing with “four elements: ‘science,’ ‘neoVictorian,’ ‘history,’ and fi nally ‘fiction’” (12–13, 15–16, 14). He premises “that lawful behavior is essential to science in the neo-Victorian novel,” and by variously constraining his hypotheses and occasionally admitting categorical instabilities in his extensive taxonomies of the four elements, Bormann’s attempt to apply scientific rigor to his subject opens up new insights into it and his two test-case novels. Although I remain unconvinced that “lawful behavior” is pronounced in science as adapted by fiction or by any other extra-scientific application, later I will refer to Bormann’s discussion of Possession as it regards the impact of science on religion. Sally Shuttleworth writes about this impact in relation to “the Victorian natural history novel”—the neo-Victorian subgenre most relevant to this study—and states that “[f]or the contemporary imagination it seems as if the Victorian age is best encapsulated not in the sweeping industrial developments made possible by science, but in the individualized crisis of faith.” She speculates that this crisis resonates with that of the late twentieth century but not because of the threat of evolutionary theory; rather, Darwinism and natural history now offer a comforting alternative to a deep-seated fear about the relationship of humans to machines, and she references dystopian science fiction in that regard (“Natural” 258, 259). Thus “[t]he Darwinian order, with its endless vistas of minute changes, and its base within a selfgoverning natural order, takes on a reassuring, almost sentimental appeal.” Perhaps “the current popularity of the Darwin story . . . can also be traced to the fact that the Darwinian revolution appears a very manageable one in human terms” because it seems to represent the heroic triumph of the human capability to create order and understanding (“Natural” 259, 260). Indeed, today we have less belief than did the Victorians that the social and natural problems created by the modern world are in fact “manageable.” Thus an ecological, self-regulating view of nature, a vision upheld by Darwinian theory, can become a substitute for religion that no longer ties the world together in meaningful ways. Seen this way, the Darwinian crisis experienced by some Victorians, especially if Victorians in general are comprehended as models for ethical sincerity in believing some things truly matter and trying to act upon them, becomes a neo-Victorian source of comfort in the present. Christian Gutleben also examines Darwinian involvement in neo-Victorianism and Victorian crises of faith: Again and again moments of apostasy or apostate characters are thoroughly depicted in neo-Victorian novels—as if the shock of godlessness were still traumatic and the need for catharsis still irrepressible. Representing the Darwinian crisis is also a starting point and a justification for contemporary fiction to register instances of further crises, especially loss of faith in man. To suggest the modern skepticism in humanity, the equivalent of the Darwinian questioning of God,

22

Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels retro-Victorian fiction depicts in detail the various atrocities man is capable of. (Nostalgic 207–08)

Gutleben cites a number of examples, including the extermination of the Tasmanians recorded in Kneale’s English Passengers. The fearful and dispiriting significance of the atom bomb registered in Ever After also applies. But those two novels are not typical of most neo-Victorian novels concerned with science and religion, the bulk of which, falling into Shuttleworth’s category of “the Victorian natural history novel,” are more positive than not about the possibility of resisting misuses of modern power and about constructive possibilities when core beliefs and the security they provide are shaken apart. Although Shuttleworth argues that such texts tend to offer comfort in the face of a fearful modern world, I believe it is incorrect to view them as sentimental in any conventional way. Most of the novels concerned with science and religion depict attitudes and behaviors that have been pervasively destructive but also, with slight evidence of sentimentality or nostalgia, offer in their treatments of the nineteenth century reason to believe modernity may be manageable even if this belief is no longer pervasive in society at large. Neo-Victorian novels involved with science and religion might be thought sentimental or nostalgic because the bulk of them tap into the romantic tradition in conveying wonderment at the ways of nature, but in general they are neither naïve about the dark, amoral side of nature nor willing to imagine that nature invites transcendence of material reality and its limitations. Gutleben’s idea of “nostalgic postmodernism,” however, might be applicable. Following the lead of Frederic Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and others who interpret postmodernism as an apolitical, essentially nostalgic creature of consumer culture, Gutleben argues that even neo- (or retro-) Victorian novels that attest to historical injustice nevertheless lack “a progressive drive” and therefore cannot escape nostalgia as their dominant mode: “the emphasis on the ill-treatment of women, homosexuals or the lower classes is not at all shocking or seditious today; on the contrary, it is precisely what the general public wants to read. So in fact the retro-Victorian novels reproduce what the Victorian novel had conceived for its immensely wide readership, that is, an aesthetics of the politically correct” (Nostalgic 46, 11–12; emphasis original). For the most part the fiction stressed in this study is not politically engaged or involved in any direct way with social remediation; however, they should not be seen as politically quiescent if in new and compelling ways they bear witness to historical injustices or traumas—and this they often do. Incorporating work done in the field of trauma studies, Gutleben along with Marie-Louise Kohlke have placed trauma at the center of neo-Victorian novels, at least if such fiction is understood as necessarily postmodern. 21 They show that “the nineteenth century has become a prominent focal point for literary investigations from contemporary perspectives into

Introduction 23 fictional reenactments of historical trauma,” in part because “neo-Victorian treatments of nineteenth-century trauma . . . are hardly as distant or estranged from our own time as they may initially seem,” and for this reason “nineteenth-century trauma[s] of doubt and uncertainty” serve as “interactive foils or mirrors of present-day traumas” while encouraging “a sympathetic, if not empathetic, understanding of . . . [Victorian] suffering” (2, 11, 13). These ideas apply to the subset of neo-Victorian novels being considered in this book. Characters who undergo crises of faith in religion, or in themselves because of the intellectual and social changes accompanying science and technology, sometimes suffer trauma. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that the entire Victorian world underwent trauma because of religious doubt or the effects of Darwinism; as pointed out earlier, the forces of unbelief and secularism were not problematic for everyone—some painlessly gave up on religion and others found ways to accommodate religion with science and with other social forces potentially conducive to unbelief. This range of response also applies to the characters I will be discussing. It is the case, however, that all of these characters undergo challenges to their belief systems, negotiating them in various ways but, in most instances, growing in self-confidence and self-understanding as a consequence. NeoVictorian uses of the science-religion relationship involve trauma but other forms of response as well. The idea of outright trauma applies best to The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Ever After, English Passengers, and This Thing of Darkness, and therefore Kohlke, Gutleben, and other critics concerned with trauma focus especially on these novels, or at least the fi rst three, which are well known. They also increasingly connect trauma with ethics. Gutleben recently has stressed this connection—amending his earlier emphasis on the nonproductive quality of nostalgia in neo-Victorian fiction—by arguing that a “return to ethics is fundamental in the appraisal of neo-Victorian fiction’s postmodernism.” He writes that “the bulk of neo-Victorian novels . . . strive to lay bare and voice the various injustices, sexual, social or political, of the Victorian era while constantly urging us to consider the possible parallels or continuations in our own contemporary period . . . [and thus] restore the prevalence of ethics” (“Shock” 138–39, 145–46). The “return to ethics” recently evidenced in philosophy and literary criticism, countering the earlier phase of postmodern relativism, necessarily accompanies neoVictorian treatments of science and religion.

VI Victorian fiction itself can lend insight into the issues of science and religion and of ethics as well. Highly admired in its day, Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888), the quintessential Victorian “crisis of faith” novel and one of the nineteenth century’s great publishing successes, anticipated

24

Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels

some of the issues relevant to the neo-Victorian texts important for this book. 22 It should be required reading for anyone wanting documentary or literary understanding of how nineteenth-century science interacted with religion. Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Arnold’s “Dover Beach” with its retreating “Sea of Faith,” Ruskin’s lament about geologists’ hammers chipping away at the Bible, and the fictional and autobiographical testimonies of other prominent writers illustrate the problem of faith in an age of science, but Ward’s novel goes into greater detail than other literary sources. It advocates a particular point of view—its allegiances and sympathies are evident throughout—but it also paints a cultural backdrop that, while initially centered on Oxford University, stretches out over a wide array of cultural provinces. High, Broad, and Low Church Anglicanism; evangelicalism of various stripes; dissenting sects; natural sciences; biblical criticism; philosophy; city and provincial life; and various socio-economic and occupational groups all impinge upon the experiences of the title character and make the novel resonant with the social and intellectual life of late nineteenth-century Britain. The science and scientific thinking that underlie Robert Elsmere’s religious struggles also remain relevant today even though for most people the psychological effects of such thinking have become largely transparent. Ward’s novel accepts science while trying to salvage some form of spirituality, which it deems necessary for human emotional and psychological welfare. A number of Victorian authors, perhaps Thomas Carlyle most influentially, attempted similar compromises. Elsmere attends Oxford late enough in the century that he encounters there at least as much science as religion. Nevertheless Oxford is experiencing a mild renaissance of High Church Anglicanism that harkens back to the Oxford Movement of the 1830s, to which the novel frequently refers; that movement had provoked at the university a liberal backlash that in turn, we are told, precipitated the current conservative counter swing in favor of the traditionalists or “ritualists” (71). But Elsmere, already interested in natural science, attends one of Oxford’s liberal colleges and there comes under the influence of skeptics familiar with the Higher Criticism that had subjected the Bible to historical analysis, an approach that tried to adhere to the ideals of scientific investigation. Under such influence, as the novel progresses he becomes increasingly convinced that biblical stories of miracles, scientifically unviable, represent cultural constructs explicable only through study of their historical circumstances. But Elsmere and the novel sharply draw back from atheism by retaining belief in God, souls, and the afterlife—the non-scientific bases of these beliefs go unacknowledged—and by thinking that some form of church organization remains possible. Attention to the Oxford Movement relates to Elsmere’s efforts late in the novel likewise to ignite religious enthusiasm through a new religious movement but this time one sensitive, though only within limits, to the scientific spirit of the times.

Introduction 25 The novel traces the life of Robert Elsmere from youth to his death in early manhood. It is a story of acute emotional struggle as his idealism, enthusiasm, and dedication to the life of the mind—seemingly innate qualities inflected with socio-historical influences—drive him away from Anglicanism and from the provincial priesthood he took up after leaving Oxford. This transition entails rejection of biblical literalism and consequent efforts in London’s East End to spread a new form of Christianity, one in which Jesus, stripped of divinity, functions simply as a model for the spiritual and moral potential in everyone; the novel clearly endorses Elsmere’s beliefs and activities. Throughout Ward’s novel Elsmere reacts to powerful personalities—he meets those most likely, in view of his predispositions, to influence his life and behavior—who occupy different positions on a spectrum of belief and unbelief. One of these is his admirable and loving wife, Catherine, whose fundamentalist principles learned from her father ballast her moral and emotional character. Elsmere’s agonizing process of religious reassessment threatens both her form of Christianity and her closeness to her husband, while he tries to monitor his behavior to bring her the least possible amount of pain. Along with its strong delineation of personalities the novel carefully captures protagonists’ shifting moods and attitudes while revealing their motivational complexity. Its breadth of knowledge and depth of sympathy contributed greatly to its popularity by embedding problems of faith within the experiences of fully realized characters faced with complex cultural and psychological realities. Despite elements of humor and wryness, Robert Elsmere represents a very earnest effort to respond to the intellectual and spiritual challenges of its time, and as the narrative moves along its didacticism becomes increasingly overt. Its earnestness and the fact that crises of faith hold little interest for most post-Victorians probably keep it from appealing to today’s readership, but on artistic as well as historical and intellectual grounds Robert Elsmere remains in many ways an impressive novel. Ward’s novel pays more attention to scientific attitudes than it does to particular sciences. Notably, it downplays evolutionary theory as a source of societal interest, not because it is untrue but because, for the well educated and liberal-minded, its scientific truth has become so evident that it is no longer inflammatory. Elsmere, who came to Darwin’s text belatedly, says, “‘I had never read even The Origin of Species before I came here [to the village where he temporarily serves as rector]. We used to take the thing half for granted, I remember, at Oxford, in a more or less modified sense. But to drive the mind through all the details of the evidence, to force one’s self to understand the whole hypothesis and the grounds for it, is a very different matter. It is a revelation.’” He then adds, about society at large, “‘There was a natural panic. . . . But the panic is passing. . . . We see the battle-field is falling into new lines’” (182–83). In other words, as the context of these passages makes clear, it is now not so much science that directly erodes religion but rather the untenable nature of many traditional,

26

Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels

Bible-based Christian beliefs for a society that, largely unconsciously, has become imbued with scientific attitudes. Elsmere’s analysis simplifies the decline of religion by relying on a single area of causation, but he is correct in recognizing that in the late nineteenth century furor over evolutionary theory subsided in tandem with religious faith. Elsmere laments the latter: “Surely Christianity of the traditional sort is failing everywhere. . . . I, at any rate, am not one of those who would seek to minimize the results of this decline for human life, nor can I bring myself to believe that Positivism or ‘evolutionary morality’ will ever satisfy the race” (430). Despite his attachment to logical or naturalistic explanations, Elsmere contends they are insufficient bases for human conduct, so here he draws a couple lines: the fi rst between Comte’s “religion of humanity” and his own theistic humanism, the second between the evolution of bodies and most instincts on the one hand and of ethics on the other. In light of subsequent history we can see that, at least regarding Britain, Ward’s novel is fighting a rearguard action, and neo-Victorian novels generally take the decline of religion as a long-since accomplished fact to which they respond in various ways. Nevertheless, although the product of its time and the subjectivity of a highly individual author, Robert Elsmere shares several themes with these other texts: reciprocal scientific advance and Christian decline, the formative influence of the past, historical change operating in the present, the mixture of nature and nurture that constitutes individual character, chance and determinism operating in tandem, fundamental concern about the challenges and potentials of human existence, and yet a largely positive disposition toward the future.

VII Earlier in this chapter I left Hardy’s character of Henry Knight hanging from a cliff. After much perplexity about what to do, Elfride figures out how to save him; flirting as always with Victorian censorship, Hardy slyly has her, outside the reader’s sight, strip off underclothing and, as the remainder of her apparel becomes wetted down by rain, tear the linen into strips to fashion a life-saving rope. Knight’s near-death experience might have changed for the better his sense of self and relationship to the world, which is largely rigid, but that is not what occurs. He drops Elfride when he suspects, erroneously, that she has a sexual past; he believes she had violated his strict ideals of female purity and decorum. Few today would deny he is fundamentally flawed because of his “Victorian” moral identity. I am interested in how fictional neo-Victorian treatments of science and religion deal with issues of morality and identity, subjects I will bring up regarding each of the featured novels. The nature of the self and of consciousness, which necessarily entails consciousness of self, has generated much literature in recent years that sometimes reflects the ongoing fi ndings

Introduction 27 of neuroscience. At the same time, as we have seen, philosophy and literary theory and criticism have witnessed a “return to ethics” as a matter of serious consideration. I agree with philosopher Charles Taylor that ethics constitutes a vital part of the modern identity, although unlike him I believe this identity incorporates crucial evolutionary components. In Sources of the Self (1989) Taylor predicates his communitarian philosophy on the idea that the modern identity has developed in an ethical direction realized through “the expressionist notion of nature as an inner moral source” and in recognition of “our deepest moral instincts, or ineradicable sense that human life is to be respected, as our mode of access to the world in which ontological claims” must be taken seriously (x, 8). Taylor’s book voluminously records the history of the various “ontologies” that have interacted with our felt and projected moral natures. Most if not all of the novels I deal with, especially because of their connections to science and religion, negotiate between characters’ innate sense of morality and their Victorian and neo-Victorian historical moments, doing so in service of the belief that “human life is to be respected.” The other ethical dimension of these novels is that external nature also is to be respected. Darwinism supports this idea in several ways. First, humans are evolutionarily connected to other species; they are relatives to be respected as such. Second, humans are part of myriad interactions of life forms with each other and their environments, and thus mindless infringements on the complexity of nature have unforeseen, often harmful consequences for both society and nature. Filled as it is with examples of such interactions and appreciation of their complexities, The Origin of Species is a founding document of ecology. Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels does not directly involve itself in environmentalism or practice ecocriticism, but it does demonstrate a general ecological consciousness in most of the fictional representations of nature it describes; it is not surprising that neo-Victorian novels privileging nature began to appear at about the same time as the environmentalist and ecological movements. Third, nature can be respected as the basis of ethical judgment itself, which almost certainly has some evolutionary basis since, like other human universals, it is unlikely to have developed unless it helped fulfill survival needs. In The Descent of Man Darwin explains morality as the consequence within gregarious species of the development of sympathy, which fosters group cooperation along with the survival value it entails, and ultimately, among humans, standards of right and wrong enforced by reason and public opinion. He optimistically imagines that for humans the advantages of sympathy will create greater and greater group identification until it embraces all forms of life (71–73, 103). 23 Respect for nature, however, does not mean that nature should be a model for human behavior, since, as Darwin was well aware, many aspects of nature are morally repugnant. In the late nineteenth century both John Stuart Mill and Thomas Huxley argued that “following nature” is a naïve and dangerous concept.24 Ethical standards arise

28

Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels

from nature but are not to be determined by its actions any more than they must be understood as the intentions of God. One of my goals is to show how these novels portray the Victorian societal shift, significantly induced by geology and biology and by the scientific mindset in general, from religion to or toward a secularist mentality, unreligious but not necessarily anti-religious, retaining a commitment to ethics. Robert Elsmere registers this shift, which in the lives of neo-Victorian characters involves responses ranging from relatively painless abandonments of Christianity to outright crises of faith that sometimes leave its victims poignantly mourning their loss of faith and innocence. These novels also exhibit a range of neo-Victorian literary tactics in manifesting these patterns. Neo-Victorian novels concerned with science and religion express Victorian concerns and doubts about historical change, the viability of religion, the benefits and costs of science, and the ideology of assured progress; in these respects Victorian science often weakened as much as supported hope for the future. Nevertheless, overall the disposition of these novels is optimistic. There are several instructive exceptions, but in most cases they present doubt about religious doctrine or other formerly unquestioned ideologies that precipitates, fi rst, protagonists’ crises of faith in their own validity as integrated and valuable selves when old belief structures become destabilized, and, second, movement toward more capable and coherent identities discovered or reconfi rmed through the potential of a secularscientific worldview, one related especially to the biological sciences, to enhance rather than subvert happiness. At the same time characters experiencing such transitions retain, or even enhance, attributes and attitudes associated with Christianity at its best: ethical awareness, hope, reverence, gratefulness, forgiveness, and wonder at a world never to be fully comprehended. But now they operate within a godless universe. Neo-Victorian secularization generally celebrates a natural order that responds to the human need for imaginative and affective transcendence of self and attachment to other forms of life. This attachment E. O. Wilson calls “biophilia”—“the urge to affiliate with other forms of life” (85)— contending that it is an inherent human characteristic though often effaced by culture. Appreciating and respecting our connection with non-human life, and with the natural world in general, becomes for most of the novels discussed in this book a source of wonder: a form of attentiveness that, in an ego-suspending release from preoccupation with past and future, apprehends evidence of the new, fresh, and surprising. It involves recognition of mystery but without the sense of self-diminishment, or attendant separation of observer and observed, that generally is thought to accompany the experience of awe or the sublime. Wonder carries with it a degree of imaginative identification with what manifests as rich and strange. I especially want to call attention to two books by literary critic George Levine, who argues that Darwinian evolution has produced the structuring capabilities of human consciousness that shape reality and lend themselves

Introduction 29 to the apprehension of wonder. He identifies wonder everywhere in Darwin’s patterns of thought and expression. Responding especially to the thinking of Max Weber and William James, Levine’s provocatively titled Darwin Loves You (2005) argues that Darwinian nature, though independent of human values and often seemingly in violation of them, actually provides a basis for a naturalistic “re-enchantment” of the world. Building on this idea, Levine’s Darwin the Writer (2011) offers “evidence to justify looking to Darwin as a potential, if not perfect, model for a thoroughly, radically secular but affectively, aesthetically, and morally enchanting vision” (xv). In Darwin’s writing Levine sees consistent celebration of the human capacity to create meaning in an inherently meaningless universe, deriving from Darwin the lesson that not only wonder, but beauty, ethics, and in fact all meaning originate in the human mind: “Darwin discovered a world in which the mind was the producer of meaning after all; it did not inhere in the nature of things.” By “registering the way the world is and reasoning through its strangeness,” Levine’s Darwin conveys “a sense of wonder and a sense of value that might be shared by everyone” (121). Although Levine does not make the connection, his idea of a meaningless universe and of the human freedom both to experience its fathomless depths and to endow it with meaning bears some relation to existentialism, which Chapter 5 discusses regarding The French Lieutenant’s Woman. More apropos to Levine’s position, however, is that of evolutionist Michael Ruse, who extols the reverence eighteenth- and nineteenth-century natural theologians felt for nature as well as that of “today’s professional evolutionists [who] respond to their subjects” with “genuine love and joy.” In this spirit Ruse advocates—without recourse to theism—what he calls “[a] theology of nature that sees and appreciates the complex, adaptive glory of the living world, rejoices in it, and trembles before it” (Darwin 335). In neo-Victorian novels concerned with science and religion the capacity for wonderment accompanies characters’ transcendence of inadequate and limiting external influences and self-conceptions, doing so whether or not that capacity is explicitly understood as Darwinian. Darwinian evolution, however, occupies intellectual and sometimes dramatic center stage in neo-Victorian novels dealing with science and religion; this applies when they are considered as a whole or, in more cases than not, as individual texts. These novels also recognize that in the nineteenth century evolutionary science increasingly presented more complications for religion than the other way around. Because of the prominence of evolution in the novels it discusses, Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels privileges the Darwinian moment: the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, which, as rendered in neo-Victorian fiction, marks a divide between how religion and science were perceived before and afterward by defi nitively tipping the balance away from traditional religion. Therefore in general, but inclusively in Chapter 3, this book moves chronologically from pre- to post-Darwinian worlds in examining what neo-Victorian

30

Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels

novels do with science and religion. Most of these novels give challenges to religion full play but respect human neediness and the religious impulse that responds to it; in this respect, although secularism predominates, these texts both resist and overlap the cultural condition recently theorized as “postsecularism”: the idea of a recent resurgence of religion—as a social manifestation, a scholarly interest, or both—and the associated rejection of the long-dominant “secular model” that found modernity fundamentally oppositional to religion.25 The novels in question directly or tacitly support Darwinian evolution because it not only evokes a harsh world—one of randomness, competition, death, and extinction—but provides resources for individuals to foster, in the face of such harshness, their own reality of ethical and aesthetic meaning. In the chapters that follow, I initially will approach my subject primarily in terms of pre-Darwinian geology, biology, and paleontology and then consider novels with post-Darwinian time frames. I am privileging nineteenth-century chronology because that is the best way to organize an otherwise unwieldy collection of in many ways disparate texts and because, in my view, awareness of history, the truth about the past as best it can be determined, should precede interpretation of what fiction does with history. 26 I will, however, attend to both the Victorian and neo-Victorian in all of the chapters although only touch upon the latter in Chapter 2, which offers a fuller view of relevant nineteenth-century historical contexts. Each of the other chapters, with one exception, discusses multiple novels with similar subjects, themes, or approaches. The concluding chapter sums up and further speculates about neo-Victorian phenomena for a present-day culture that appears dissatisfied with science divorced from values and in search of a replacement for the meaning traditionally afforded by religion.

2

Reconstructing History “The World-Renowned Ichthyosaurus”

I Ichthyosaurs and their fossils surface in six of the neo-Victorian novels discussed in this book, and this prominence is not accidental: the remains of these creatures were strange, sometimes very large, and culturally significant. The first of the great prehistoric reptiles identified and the first discovered in Britain, the ichthyosaur (“fish-lizard”) was implicated in natural history, in the increasingly specialized and professionalized disciplines of geology and paleontology, and in evolutionary biology. It was also concerned in the interactions of these fields with religion, participating in nineteenth-century confusions about the earth’s age, the origins of species, the causes of extinctions, and how to comprehend ancient, gigantic animals unaccounted for by the Bible. This chapter will approach the science-religion relationship, an important topic in hundreds of books and articles in the 1800s, via the following mixture of nineteenth-century personages and texts involved in the reconstruction and representation of ichthyosaurs: fossil hunter Mary Anning, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, comparative anatomist Richard Owen, Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Together they elucidate the history that provided material for neoVictorian reconstruction and representation of the past. Another application of the ichthyosaur occurs in Penelope Lively’s novel City of the Mind (1991), which at the end of this chapter serves as a bridge from the Victorian to the neo-Victorian. Like other radically new phenomena at odds with familiar categories of thought, the ichthyosaur presented to the nineteenth century a compelling problem, one both entangled with human aspirations and anxieties and receptive to the interpretive imagination. In various ways the ichthyosaur of scientific and popular imagination swam in unsettled cultural waters.

II In recent years accounts of early ichthyosaur discoveries have stressed the scientific acumen and accomplishment, once downplayed because of gender

32 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels and class, of fossil collector Mary Anning (1799–1847).1 At Lyme Regis, Dorset—the epicenter of paleontological shocks and excitement that radiated out to Britain and beyond—Anning discovered, excavated, and assembled the fi rst fossilized ichthyosaur skeletons beginning in 1811.2 Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures, about the life of Mary Anning, is one of the texts to be discussed in Chapter 3. Here I will use her background and career to introduce the characteristics of natural history and its relation to formalized science. Natural history is an important subject in the majority of the neo-Victorian novels examined in this book. Mary Anning’s home town of Lyme Regis, once a major port but by the eighteenth century in decline, in the second half of that century gradually reinvented itself as a resort and tourist destination. One of its attractions was the great numbers of fossils that emerged from its eroding cliffs. A clear understanding of the nature of fossils did not generally exist before the nineteenth century; though various theories about their origins were put forward, fossils previously had been regarded mostly as curiosities of uncertain origin and purport. Viewing them as such, early visitors to Lyme often took home fossilized remains including ammonites, trilobites, belemnites, and pieces of petrified bone. By the early nineteenth century, however, the character of fossils as vestiges of dead animals and plants was becoming widely acknowledged, and obtaining them was becoming a passion for collectors. When Mary Anning was young her family, always on or over the brink of poverty, supplemented its income by selling fossils to Lyme’s visitors, whether as objects of natural history or merely as keepsakes, and already as a young girl Anning was adept at fi nding desirable specimens. As she grew older she became skillful at excavating, cleaning, assembling, mounting, and drawing them and at making inferences about the character and lives of the creatures they represented. She eventually became widely known for collecting fossils, which she sold to amateur collectors or directly to paleontologists—though the terms “paleontology” and “paleontologist” did not exist until the 1830s (OED)—who wrote papers about her most important discoveries, publicized them at meetings and conferences, and received scientific credit. Mary Anning’s background and life reflect a period in which fossils changed from objects of unfocused curiosity to important expressions of natural history and finally to a source of specialized scientific investigation—which was, of course, the province of males. Natural history dominated much of the nineteenth century, a time when learned and unlearned enthusiasts observed, drew, painted, collected, compared, traded, and displayed specimens of nature’s products—flowers, insects, rocks, shells, fossils, bird nests—any and all natural objects susceptible to sampling and classifying. Natural history was practiced throughout Western Europe but particularly in Britain, where its popularity eventually embraced the lower as well as the leisured classes and children as well as adults. Specimens often were placed in “cabinets”—shelves, drawers, cases, or other areas for organizing and display. Although there were overlaps,

Reconstructing History

33

natural history early in the century was not what would become known as “science.” Science in that sense developed out of the tradition of natural philosophy, which split off from natural history in the eighteenth century. Lynn L. Merrill explains the distinction: “Natural history studied appearances; natural philosophy investigated relationships. . . . natural history excelled at description and classification of forms into groups. But natural philosophy sought to understand actions between forms.” Furthermore, incorporating natural philosophy, Victorian science bore the impact of “two developments [that] irrevocably altered its character: professionalization and the growth of specialized disciplines . . . to replace the older natural history and even general biology” (77, 78). Some of the Anning family’s customers for fossils were simply tourists interested in curios, some were natural historians or “naturalists,” while others approximated what today we understand as scientists, although that word only entered the language in 1840 (OED). Naturalists and collectors no doubt had long noted parts of fossilized ichthyosaur skeletons, unaware of what they were, but the complete and nearly complete ones unearthed by Mary Anning became the immediate concern of scientists, as did her later momentous fi nds of the fi rst plesiosaurs and of the fi rst British pterodactyl. Although Anning was a devout Christian, knew and loved the Bible, and grew up as a member of a dissenting church given to literalist readings of scripture, little is known about how she reconciled contradictions between Genesis and the meaning of her fi nds. But religion apparently did not interfere with her inquisitiveness and intelligence; she accepted scientific, extra-biblical evidence for an ancient earth and repeated extinctions. Furthermore, she understood and was open to the general idea of evolution (Emling 188). There is no evidence for religious doubt let alone a crisis of faith. But the ichthyosaurs and other imposing saurians Anning and others brought to light challenged many believers at a time when the majority of naturalists and scientists were still largely conventional Christians. In a society imbued with a taste for natural history, both believers and nonbelievers understood these extinct animals, whether theologically frightening or not, as wondrous. The ichthyosaur took on this quality because of its strangeness and its nineteenth-century historical precedence.

III By the middle of the nineteenth century, especially because of widespread enthusiasm for natural history, most educated people in Western Europe had heard of the ichthyosaur, and Jules Verne makes use of its fame in his novel Voyage au centre de la Terre (1864, 1867). The fi rst English translation, published in 1871 as A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, like the original features an epic combat between two enormous marine reptiles but identifies one of them as “the world-renowned ichthyosaurus” (Ch. 30).

34

Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels

One of many alterations the British rendition imposes upon Verne’s second, expanded edition of his novel, the spurious “world-renowned” most likely was added not only because the ichthyosaur was well known and thus would heighten interest, but also to appeal to nationalism since ichthyosaur fossils were fi rst identified, described, and publicized in England. Although early investigators soon recognized the ichthyosaur’s skeletal structure as reptilian, one of the fi rst things that struck observers about the specimens being disinterred from cliffs and quarries was the similarity the streamlined shape of the living animal must have borne to those of presentday dolphins and fast-swimming fish.3 Of even more obvious note were immense crocodile-like jaws lined with scores of conical teeth. Equally apparent were its enormous eye sockets. With imposing teeth and eyes, the largest specimens—Mary Anning’s initial fi nd measured thirty feet and larger ones were discovered later—suggested a creature out of myth and legend; Verne heightened this effect by making his version a hundred feet long and spectacularly ferocious. This mythic quality coupled with the realization that it actually existed made the ichthyosaur particularly strange and interesting—as was the case for the other great extinct reptiles, often described as “dragons,” whose initial discoveries likewise occurred in England: the plesiosaur, megalosaur, and iguanodon.4 This strangeness is subtly enhanced by the best-known translation of Journey, which attaches ichthyosaurs and other prehistoric animals to the Bible-based strangeness implicit in the theory known as preadamitism. Produced by a scientifically-minded Anglican priest, Frederick Amadeus Malleson (1819–97), the 1877 English translation entitled A Journey into the Interior of Earth—the basis of many later editions—is far more accurate than the 1871 version but nevertheless makes emendations that, by responding theologically to the mass of geological information and misinformation Verne weaves into his narrative, bear upon the ichthyosaur and its nineteenth-century significance. This significance includes the relationship of science and religion and the efforts of some to harmonize their apparent discrepancies. Malleson participates in this project through his translation of a particular word. On four occasions when Verne employs the term “antediluvians,” Malleson translates it as “preadamite” rather than the more accurate and obvious “antediluvian.” 5 For example, in leading up to the reptilian combat, the narrator muses upon “the monsters of the preadamite world, who . . . preceded the animals of mammalian race upon the earth” (Ch. 33). By mid-century “preadamite” had assumed as one of its meanings the generalized idea of “ancient” or of the later word “prehistoric,” although not quite to the degree that “antediluvian” and its French equivalent had done. But as used by Malleson, it also recalls the heterodox notion that God created the earth and various life forms long before He did Adam and Eve—an association that “antediluvian” does not carry. Preadamitism was given prominence by Isaac de la Peyrère (1596–1676). The theological core of his position was that a New Testament passage

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by Paul about divine law, and the sinfulness that preexisted Law, refers to commandments given to Adam rather than Moses, and therefore that humans must have existed before Adam. Later advocates of preadamitism sometimes founded their beliefs upon the two creation stories in Genesis: the fi rst, Genesis 1:1–2:3, in which the names Adam and Eve do not occur, was thought to cover a vast expanse of time that witnessed God’s preadamite creations, while the succeeding one concerned the creation of Adam and Eve and the familiar post-adamite world. Some versions claimed merely that the earth and various animals existed before Adam and Eve, while others asserted that humans also had long preceded the biblical pair. Preadamite humans were sometimes used to explain the multiplicity of races, and in the nineteenth century the theory supported racism with the idea that non-White races were in fact separate species descended from ancient preadamites inferior to the Caucasian Adam and Eve; polygenesis, the notion that human races are different species, will be an important topic in Chapter 4. Sanctioned by literalist readings of the Bible, the belief that the earth was only some thousands of years old had prevailed until challenged by late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century geology, but preadamitism had already adopted the idea of the world’s ancientness. A relatively minor but resilient force through the nineteenth century, preadamitism appeared in new versions published not long before Malleson’s translation of Journey—books that might well have influenced it: Isabelle Duncan’s Pre-Adamite Man (1860), popular enough to warrant multiple printings over the course of several years, and Dominick M’Causland’s Adam and the Adamite: The Harmony of Scripture and Ethnology (1864). Both texts attempted to reconcile religion with science, biblically assimilating geological evidence for an ancient earth. Paschal Beverly Randolph’s 1863 Pre-Adamite Man, however, eschewed reconciliation between the two spheres and instead supported what it understood as a strictly scientific approach (Livingstone, Adam’s 111). Tracing preadamitism from its theological origins through its science-related manifestations in the nineteenth century, David N. Livingstone, in his detailed expositions of the idea’s complex history, presents the theory as an important instance, especially in its nineteenth-century form, of “the harmonizing tactics that have been deployed to keep alive the marriage of science and religion” (“Preadamite” ix–x). While not highly religious, Verne apparently also was interested in such harmonizing, especially regarding an ancient earth to which both preadamitism and nineteenth-century geology attested.6 To some degree the balancing of science and religion occurs in Chapter 32 when Axel, Verne’s narrator, recounts a lengthy waking dream in which he retrogresses through time, witnessing various stages of the earth’s history back to its creation; like Thomas Hardy and A Pair of Blue Eyes, discussed in Chapter 1, Verne drew on earlier popular science accounts of rewinding earth history. In Verne’s vision the earth’s development comes about through natural processes, but

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he supplements his descriptions with biblical references. For example, in Malleson’s translation, Axel says, “I return to the scriptural periods or ages of the world, conventionally called ‘days,’ long before the appearance of man when the unfinished world was as yet unfitted for his support” (Ch. 32). A French version of the phrase “conventionally called ‘days,’” however, does not appear in Verne’s original. Verne is willing, via Axel at least, to employ—perhaps with a touch of irony—the belief, held by believers in preadamitism and others, that over a great expanse of time the pre-human world was directed toward conditions that would allow human habitation. Malleson adds the well-known idea, sometimes adopted by partisans of preadamitism, that the six days of creation of Genesis were in fact six ages or epochs each of enormous duration. Elsewhere Axel’s vision is overtly touched by Verne’s skeptical treatment of Genesis-derived beliefs. This occurs when he has Axel ironically describe an extinct creature, “the Anoplothere,” as “a singular animal taking after the rhinoceros, the horse, the hippopotamus, and the camel, as if the Creator, in too much of a hurry in the fi rst hours of the world, had put together several animals in one” (Journey 152). Apparently not appreciating Verne’s fanciful disrespect, Malleson censors the reference to divine fallibility, reducing the passage to “the anoplotherium (unarmed beast), a strange creature, which seemed a compound of horse, rhinoceros, camel, and hippopotamus” (Ch. 32). Verne’s willingness to reconcile science and religion is limited, unlike that of Malleson with his beliefs deriving from, or at least consistent with, preadamitism. In Chapter 39 Malleson again promotes “preadamite” over the more accurate and somewhat more generalized “antediluvian” when the appearance of one of the protagonists, afflicted by a violent storm and strange electrical phenomena, suggests “a comparison with preadamite man, the contemporary of the ichthyosaurus and the megatherium.” Malleson provides a corrective footnote, “Rather of the mammoth and the mastodon. (Trans.).” As demonstrated throughout the text, both Verne and his narrator know that humans historically did not coexist with ichthyosaurs, and the mistake is explained not only by Axel’s fear and excitement but by the whole imaginative thrust of a novel that makes its fictional characters contemporaries of subterranean ichthyosaurs and other extinct creatures mixed together from different geological eras. Indeed, Verne supplies a specimen of a human who lives in the midst of prehistoric animals and contemporaneously with ichthyosaurs: a gigantic herder of mastodons, glimpsed from afar, whom Malleson, again pushing his biblical notions beyond what Verne warrants, identifies as “preadamite” rather than as Verne’s “antediluvian” (Ch. 39). Voyage began the trend of confronting humans with extinct prehistoric animals; it occurs, for instance, in early twentieth-century novels by Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs, in Jurassic Park and its movie spin-offs, and in numerous cartoons, printed and animated, stretching from the mid-nineteenth century to today.

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Verne’s minor efforts, and Malleson’s stronger ones, to harmonize science and religion are part of the complicated story of nineteenth-century geology—its discoveries, competing theories, and interactions with society at large. John Breyer and William Butcher point out that Verne’s novel adopts the theories of both progressionism and directionalism (48). Progressionism means that geological and fossil evidence illustrates a trajectory of increased biological complexity leading to humans and the modern world, a pattern informing Voyage throughout; prior to The Origin of Species even geologists generally understood progressionism to entail a form of special creation, with ever more sophisticated species independently appearing across the ages via divine agency. At the same time, however, progressionism sometimes accommodated the idea that individual species themselves eventually tend toward degeneration, as evidenced in Axel’s statements that fossils show “both fish and reptiles alike are more perfect the further back they were created” and—anticipating the upcoming encounter with the enormous crocodile-like ichthyosaur—that “even the largest and most formidable crocodiles and alligators, are but feeble reductions of their fathers of the fi rst ages” (qtd. in Breyer and Butcher 49–50; Journey, Butcher trans. 151, 156).7 Mid-nineteenth-century directionalism, a natural complement to progressionism, held that ancient geological processes, however catastrophic, differ only in degree, not in kind, from present-day ones, but that direction is nonetheless implied by changes caused by the cooling of the earth. This theory also colors a number of Axel’s statements, as Breyer and Butcher point out (48–49). Some religious orientations accepted the idea of directional history as progress—the world becoming more suitable for mammalian and ultimately human life—and of species degeneration—individual groups of animals falling off in complexity. Louis Figuier’s popular La terre avant le deluge (1863, 1872) articulates the orderly scheme in which God perfects individual life forms while replacing lower with higher ones. Of late Jurassic ichthyosaurs and their contemporaries, he says, “Nature seems to have wished to bring this class of animals to the highest state of development,” but he also asserts that all prehistoric animals demonstrate that “the organization and physiological functions go on improving unceasingly, and that each of the extant genera which preceded the appearance of man, present, for each organ, modifications which always tend towards greater perfection.” Figuier ends his discussion of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs by stating, “let us learn . . . to recognise, with admiration, the divine proofs of design which they display, and in their organisation to see only the handiwork of the Creator” (220, 223). This injunction expresses the influence of natural theology, most famously advanced in the works of William Paley through his analogical “argument from design”—that design proves the existence of a designer, and evidence of design in nature therefore proves the existence of God. Natural theology caused most naturalists and early paleontologists to fi nd

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everywhere instances of divine handiwork. William Buckland’s Geology and Mineralogy: Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (1837), in an early published description of ichthyosaurs, discusses the perfection of design in the ichthyosaur species that had been discovered to that point and concludes that “we cannot but recognise throughout them all, the workings of one and the same eternal principle of Wisdom and Intelligence, presiding from fi rst to last over the total fabric of Creation” (1:146). In Britain natural theology incorporated the combination of directionalism and progressionism, and it “became an article of faith among natural theologians that both the history of the Earth and the history of life represented the unfolding of a divine plan designed to produce an Earth perfectly suited for human habituation” (Van Riper 65). An influential contribution to this line of thought was John Harris’s popular The Pre-Adamite Earth (1846), which responded to evidence of geological history by demonstrating “how the development of the earth constituted an extended preparation for its later human occupants” while going out of its way to reject biological evolution (qtd. in Livingstone, Adam’s 82). But although progressionism could be reconciled with divine wisdom, to some it also had suggested evolution—or transmutation as it was known prior to the Origin—an idea with which scientists were familiar in the fi rst half of the century and which many dismissed out of hand as unbiblical and, because of its connection with revolutionary France, dangerous. These connections caused some pious naturalists to reject any sort of progressionism. For example, Presbyterian minister George Young, who in 1819 gained notoriety for ichthyosaur discoveries, acknowledges the idea of evolution but draws back: “Some have alleged, in support of the pre-Adamite theory, that . . . we discern . . . a gradual progress from the more rude and simple creatures, to the more perfect and completely organised; as if the Creator’s skill had improved by practice. But for this strange idea there is no foundation: creatures of the most perfect organization occur in the lower beds as well as the higher” (qtd. in Winchester 113). One might believe species degeneration resulted from the Fall, but the idea that God, the perfect designer, needed to improve on imperfect designs seemed preposterous. Verne draws on the geological theories of his time, often with much the same expression of awe fostered by natural theology, but without the argument from design or any other clear theological investment. Adopting the idea of temporally localized biological degeneration within the context of overall long-term improvement, though not evolutionary improvement, he presents his ichthyosaur as not only “the most frightful of all the antediluvian reptiles” but as a supreme expression of nature’s creative power. It reigned for ages when “hideous monsters held absolute sway” and were provided “with the most complete structures. What gigantic organisms! What exceptional strength!” (Journey 159, 156). Verne dignifies the ichthyosaur as both the high point of reptilian development and a dramatic moment in the development of life on earth, an expression of both progressionism and directionalism.

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Both doctrines, however, eventually had to confront Charles Lyell’s sophisticated advocacy of uniformitarianism, which, building upon the foundational work of James Hutton (1726–97), rejected earlier theories such as Neptunism, Plutonism, and catastrophism while dismissing progressionism and directionalism.8 In the three volumes of Principles of Geology (1830–33) Lyell argues for the continuity of natural processes, operating cyclically but in the long term in a steady-state fashion, thus denying ultimate progress or directionality in either geological or biological spheres. In this regard Lyell, who at this point in his career believed in independent special creations, unguardedly speculates that ichthyosaurs might someday return when environments again become suitable for their habitation (Principles 1:123). In Journey to the Centre of the Earth the ichthyosaur does return in fictional form, an embodiment of lurid sublimity with its “huge jaws,” “rows of aggressive teeth,” and “bloody eye as big as a man’s head” (158, 159). And having already returned via the excavations of Mary Anning and others and the reconstructions of paleontologists and artists, this creature— the fi rst large extinct reptile identified and soon represented by multiple specimens—became an iconic focal point in nineteenth-century speculation about the history of life on earth. From early in the century it was interpreted and reinterpreted through scientific research and conjecture and through popular imaginings. As one new find followed another, ichthyosaurs appeared in newspaper, journal, and magazine articles; in drawings, prints, and cartoons; and even in poetry (see Glendening, “‘World Renowned’” 31–38).9

IV Ichthyosaurs also were rendered as full-scale models. This occurred as an offshoot of the famous Great Exhibition staged in the Crystal Palace in 1851, an event recorded in a number of neo-Victorian novels including Swift’s Ever After. The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations featured exhibits meant to teach visitors of all social classes about the fruits of knowledge, especially regarding science, technology, and history, and in particular about British accomplishments in these areas. Behind the exhibition lay the idea of inexorable human progress. After the Exhibition the Crystal Palace was relocated from Hyde Park to Sydenham, on the southern outskirts of London, where the enormous building continued its task of public education and, through both its contents and its revolutionary glass and cast-iron construction, it continued to celebrate the progress of human knowledge and capability. Upon the Palace’s 1854 reopening visitors to its grounds encountered a new display that exhibited such advancement of knowledge: a collection of full-sized models of various large extinct creatures and a reconstruction of

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their original environment complete with vegetation, an artificial lake, and islands on which the reproductions were situated. They had been created under the guidance of nineteenth-century Britain’s most famous comparative anatomist, Richard Owen (1804–92), who is the focus of this section of Chapter 2. Except perhaps for the two pterodactyls, the most accurate of the species displayed are three ichthyosaurs; by mid-century ichthyosaurs were known through many specimens, some of them complete. Owen’s models of them, relatively though not completely accurate, contrast with the exhibit’s dinosaurs, which at the time were known through fewer and quite incomplete remains. For example, the massive iguanodon is depicted as a quadruped, standing on four legs rather than two, its form and stature largely mammalian. According to Adrian Desmond, Owen wanted the models to look more advanced than extant reptiles, undercutting preDarwinian evolutionary theory by suggesting that the Mesozoic animals represented at Sydenham, rather than having evolved into mammals, had long before already reached a high point of development and then degenerated into the present-day reptiles; other authorities have disagreed with this assessment (Desmond, “Designing” 224–34, 228; see Rupke 80–81). Overall Owen’s models of ichthyosaurs improved on earlier visual representations by profiting from the cumulative and self-correcting nature of scientific investigation, an area in which “progress,” understood as the accretion and refi nement of objective truths (the earth orbits the sun, DNA is a double helix . . . ), should be acknowledged. Only in the second half of the 1800s did it become clear that ichthyosaurs had forked dorsal fi ns and gave live birth, and only recently was it discovered that the skin of ichthyosaurs contained collagen fibers—most likely making their bodies rigid and slick to assist in high-speed swimming—and that one genus produced individuals of seventy feet in length, along the lines of Verne’s gigantic version. Some philosophers and historians of science, however, have rejected both science’s ability to establish objective truths and its privileged status; there has been much controversy surrounding this issue.10 Nevertheless, science continually attempts to slough off entanglements with non-science—with the ideas and issues of general culture that impose themselves, also continuously, on scientific thinking and research. Science can never entirely free itself from such involvements, but it accumulates and refi nes knowledge regardless. Whatever its social or psychological impact, religion has been an important source of non-scientific entanglement with science. Richard Owen and his reconstruction of biological history illustrate as much. His science, especially when considered in its cultural context, is a complex matter that has received lengthy analyses.11 I will draw on Owen to demonstrate further the cultural permeability of science and religion and, at the end of this chapter, to consider neo-Victorian fictional reconstruction of the past. Owen offers a good example of the shift from natural history to biological science as it became specialized, professionalized, and institutionalized: the

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member of many learned societies, he earned his living and fame by studying and comparing the remains of animals, publishing copiously, attending professional meetings and conferences, and overseeing collections and museums. His scientific career therefore was mostly indoors, though an exception occurred in 1839 when he decided, while visiting Bristol, to “take a run down to make love to Mary Anning at Lyme” (qtd. in Emling 174). He had not met Anning before but knew paleontologists who had greatly profited from their acquaintance with her. She took him on a fossil-hunting excursion along with prominent geologists William Buckland and William Conybeare; these two men, along with Henry De la Beche, were Anning’s long-time acquaintances and scientific beneficiaries. Despite unsuccessful post-Origin feuds with Darwin and his followers, Owen was a towering figure in Victorian science who advanced the fields of comparative anatomy and paleontology, achieving important insights into the forms and functions of present-day and extinct animals. He was also a man of his time caught up in its understandings and issues as they interacted with his scientific efforts and his formidable ambition. Owens appears not to have been a Christian in any conventional sense, but religious and metaphysical ideas influenced him and his science. Early in his career Owens had subscribed to special creation, but according to Nicolaas Rupke, after 1843 he moved away from that position, at least in his public utterances (142). A biologist and geologist, Rupke focuses especially on another shift: from functionalist to transcendental anatomy. Dominant in the early part of the century and ascendant again after Darwin, functionalism stresses that morphological features derive from the uses to which they are put. Functionalism had been important for natural theology: God designed organisms to function in accordance with their environments. The transcendental approach, influential in Britain for a number of years at mid-century especially because of Owen, understands organic forms as elaborations on a pre-existent plan, the archetype, an idea that minimizes the relationship between function and environment that is crucial for both Lamarckian and Darwinian theories. Through extensive and detailed comparisons of skeletons of different species, Owen identified what he understood as the archetype for all vertebrates. Various body types develop from the archetype by means of, in a phrase he repeats in several publications, “the continuous operation of the ordained becoming of living things.” Therefore, although Owen backed away from the argument from design, he left space for God, without actually arguing the case, since preordination implies a cause or source. Owen was not opposed to all evolutionary thinking, but because of widespread hostility to transmutation he mostly shied away from the subject until the publication of the Origin forced his hand, and then he attacked publically what he saw as weaknesses in Darwin’s reliance on natural selection and its attendant gradualism; he ended up accepting that natural selection could explain extinctions but not changes to species

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(Rupke 170). Habitually cautious, Owen did not promote a counter theory to explain the trajectory of increasingly more complex life forms apparent in the fossil record. Privately he seems to have favored the idea, similar to what Robert Chambers argues in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and perhaps influenced by it, that sometimes embryos take on the forms of new and more sophisticated species distinctively different from their parents. Here Owen’s “ordained becoming” operates as a form of vitalism in which a life force teleologically directs biological history. On occasion it abruptly causes new and higher forms to appear, phenomena apparently consistent with the fossil record in which new species often seem to replace old ones quite suddenly. Owen’s life force and its abrupt elaborations upon the archetype perhaps do not have to be understood theistically, but they move in that direction—the vagueness of the process encourages it—as they express themselves through secondary causes in accordance with a transcendental plan. Adrian Desmond sums up the matter: “Owen’s secondary causes . . . were simply the means of translating the Word into flesh” (Archetypes 44). Owens’s line of thinking about organic development supported his denial that humans evolved from apes, an implication of Darwinian evolution he found demeaning and that he attacked in print. In Owen’s view the two were not essentially interrelated; rather, at some point there was a dramatic leap forward—an embryonic one he suspected—and humans superseded apes as something qualitatively different and far more advanced. The process is not “special creation,” but it retains for humans the specialness with which Genesis says they were created. In Owen’s scheme humans were either the ultimate goal of biological development or at least a very special one—“[h]is vertebrate archetype . . . was historically realized in nature by a process of continuous divergent development, culminating in man” (Evelleen Richards 151)—and chance could play no role in humans’ preordained existence nor in the development of life in general. One of Owen’s objections to Darwinian evolution is that it seemed to rely on randomness in the appearance of the individual variations upon which natural selection operates. In short, whereas Owen believed he inductively derived his transcendental ideas by means of strictly empirical investigation, religion—or ideas interlaced with religion—in fact heavily influenced his theories as well as how he expressed or disguised them. His reaction to pre-Darwinian and then Darwinian evolution was part of an uneasy attempt, apparent in his public shifts and avoidances, to serve both science and the religious values of his society. His reputation was of overwhelming importance to him. But he fought a losing battle against Darwinian theory as Darwin’s champions, especially “Darwin’s bulldog” Thomas Huxley, continually attacked his ideas including his showpiece theory of archetypes. More generally, the materialism and naturalism of Owen’s opponents separated science from religion, part of Britain’s long, drawn-out movement toward secularism.

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Darwinism was one factor in the ongoing secularization of the British, although very few by the end of the century had become outright atheists. Not even Huxley joined their ranks, instead coining the term “agnostic” to describe his condition of non-knowledge about God even though he could see no evidence for God’s existence. In his autobiography Darwin decides that “agnostic” is the best label for his own stance on religion (94). But Darwinism did help push some people into atheism, and Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad were two of them. In their novels The Woodlanders and Heart of Darkness ichthyosaurs appear as annunciations of unbelief.

V At the end of the nineteenth century Victorian readers were familiar with ichthyosaurs in a way few are today. At the same time the ichthyosaur had become commonplace enough in popular culture that its significance was often reduced from that of a wonder, whether fearful or not, to a representative of a defunct species, something like the dodo. In The Time Machine (1895) H. G. Wells has his narrator say of the distant future “that horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, had followed the ichthyosaurus into extinction” (15). But for scientists and non-scientists alike, the ichthyosaur now necessarily suggested evolution as well as extinction. Hardy and Conrad bring not only these general understandings of ichthyosaurs to bear in their depictions but also the religious skepticism that had been growing among the British for most of the century. In the fi rst half of the nineteenth century evolutionary theory was available but mostly spurned by naturalists, scientists, and knowledgeable laymen like Jules Verne, who never literarily entertained the concept even though Journey to the Centre of the Earth appeared after the Origin. The evolutionary theories available to the British prior to Darwin’s were primarily Lamarckism, denigrated not only for lacking evidence but for being unbiblical and for its association with the freethinking and radicalism of the French Revolution era out of which it emerged, and Robert Chambers’s “developmental hypothesis,” set forth in multiple editions of the Vestiges, which despite popularity with the general reading public was notorious with scientists—Owen apparently was something of a closeted exception—and rejected on any number of grounds. Later in the century the situation had changed because of Darwin, and even scientists unwilling to accept natural selection, his explanation for evolution, generally accepted his masses of evidence for evolution itself. This same attitude held true for much of the well-educated population, but Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad accepted not only Darwin’s evidence but his theory (see Glendening, Evolutionary 72–73, 228). Therefore at the end of the century the application of Darwinian theory, which later chapters will deal with more fully in regard to neo-Victorianism, informs two brief but suggestive references to ichthyosaurs, each part

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of a simile, found in Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887) and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899, 1902). Of three registers of meaning generally attached to these animals throughout much of the nineteenth century—aggressiveness, extinction, and the scientific progress displayed in continual discoveries and analyses of their fossils—these instances most focus on extinction or, more precisely, on death, since extinction is death writ large; they do so in a manner reminiscent of Tennyson’s gloomy meditation on the meaning of fossils in In Memoriam. They register, rather like Victorian critics of capitalism’s survival of the fittest ethos, a pessimistic adoption of Darwinism in which life for the few means suffering and death for the many. As noted, the passages take for granted reader familiarity with ichthyosaurs, even though their fame gradually had been eclipsed by that of the dinosaurs whose fossils British scientists had been discovering and identifying since the 1830s. The two novelists, however, eschew the celebration of science that is central to Verne’s Journey. And as atheists, Hardy and Conrad have no interest in reconciling science with religion. Rather, at a point in history not long before ichthyosaurs largely leave popular consciousness, the representative value of Hardy’s and Conrad’s ichthyosaurs is that, for all their alien strangeness, they are inflected with basic human apprehensions and thus represent not only late-Victorian anxieties but those of most humans. The novelists’ references, taken in their narrative and thematic contexts, involve several interrelated concepts that connect ichthyosaurs, and through them evolutionary thinking, to the human condition: death, extinction, and the destructive confl ict and inadequate adaptation that produce them. In The Woodlanders these factors apply to the woods in which the novel is set. Part wild and part cultivated for the timber that sustains the local economy, they evidence the Darwinian sort of competition, struggle, and death that for Hardy informs both nature and culture. For instance, from the woods arises “the creaking sound of two over-crowded branches . . . which were rubbing each other into wounds on old trees” (13). The personification is appropriate, for the locals struggle in much the same way as they try to make their living from timber. The narrator also describes trees from which “huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs. Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention, which makes life what it is, was as obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds of a city slum. The leaf was deformed, the curve was crippled, the taper was interrupted; the lichen eat the vigor of the stalk, and the ivy slowly strangled to death the promising sapling” (41). In Hardy’s world there is little that fulfills the aspirations of humans, beset as they are by consciousness of self and mortality and no longer at ease with the nature out of which they arose and never escape. Constraints with Darwinian overtones also affect the main character, Grace Melbury. Having been sent away by her timber-merchant father to be educated above the level of her former associates, she returns a polished lady no longer well suited to the cultural milieu and setting that produced her—an instance of faulty adaptation to environment, social more than

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natural. When the man her father had intended her to marry, the noble and self-sacrificing laborer Giles Winterbourne, loses his house and prospects through an unfortunate stroke of luck, with her father’s encouragement she marries instead the young doctor, Edgar Fitzpiers, who wins her especially because of his education and prestigious family. Soon she realizes her social ambitions have connected her to an unsuitable spouse and it is the devoted Giles—simple, at ease with nature, and natural-seeming himself—whom she loves. But, this being a Hardy novel, her realization comes too late. After a series of complications enveloping various characters, Giles dies as the result of trying to protect Grace’s reputation after she abandons the adulterous Fitzpiers. Before this occurs, however, Grace spends a long night and day alone waiting for Giles to return to his house. It is at this point that Hardy produces a Darwinian scenario that leads to his allusion to ichthyosaurs. While waiting for Giles, Grace looks out on trees jacketed with lichen and stockinged with moss. At their roots were stemless yellow fungi like lemons and apricots, and tall fungi with more stem than stool. Next were more trees close together, wrestling for existence, their branches disfigured with wounds resulting from their mutual rubbings and blows. It was the struggle between these neighbors that she had heard in the night. Beneath them were the rotting stumps of those of the group that had been vanquished long ago, rising from their mossy setting like decayed teeth from green gums. Here the narrator has slipped from Grace’s point of view into his own, as he does in describing one tree in particular: “Above stretched an old beech, with vast armpits, and great pocket-holes in its sides where branches had been amputated in past times; a black slug was trying to climb it. Dead boughs were scattered about like ichthyosauri in a museum” (234). The old beech is reminiscent of Darwin’s metaphorical “Tree of Life,” whose branches and twigs represent not only species arising from a common source and ramifying as they stretch upward through time, but also, as they die and fall off, extinct species that have lost the struggle for survival (Origin 129–30). In this scheme ichthyosaurs are losers, castoffs from the tree of life. But they are so only through the interpretive imagination, which endows them with human significance by associating them with mutually antagonistic anthropomorphic trees and reconstructing them within the cultural space of a museum. But in Hardy’s vision, human culture—a cause of “amputations”—conspires with nature to human detriment, for struggle becomes all the more destructive because people have to adjust themselves to immensely complicated conditions, internal and external, constituted of social and natural orders together. Like the imagined ichthyosaurs, Grace and Giles fail to adapt or compete with the forces arrayed against them; essentially, Grace has failed to reconcile culture with nature while Giles

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has failed to do the opposite. Unfairly perceived in terms of non-adaptation rather than their extremely long-term evolutionary success, extinct ichthyosaurs signify the extinction of Grace’s hopes and Giles’s life, with the novel analogous to a bone-filled museum insofar as both strongly indicate the connection between the fates of ichthyosaurs and humans. Ultimately the ichthyosaurs represent humanity, self-consciously aware of “the Unfulfilled Intention,” unfulfi lled because of the impossibility that life can evade loss or defeat death. In context, Conrad’s reference also expresses Darwinian pessimism in which the import of ichthyosaurs is deflected toward the human. Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness, recalls his long-ago experience as a captain employed by a Continental trading company to take a steamboat far up a great African river to relieve Kurtz, the trader at the Company’s most interior station who, word has it, is very sick. But when Marlow arrives where he is to assume command, he finds the boat is submerged in the river, supposedly the result of an accident but in fact scuttled under orders of the local company manager. The official’s motive is that Kurtz, although the Company’s most successful supplier of ivory, appears destined to take over his job because he represents a faction at the European headquarters that wants the African operation to treat Blacks humanely. The Manager’s behavior, however, represents more a rape of Africa than a trading operation, and he has delayed the trip meant to help Kurtz—something Marlow does not suspect until much later—hoping that he will have died in the meantime. While he is still involved in repairing the boat, Marlow imagines an ichthyosaur. He has already seen appalling evidence of the death and destruction wrought by imperialist greed, but he also interprets the jungle and the Africans as primitive forces just as inimical, in their way, to civilized ethical standards as the behavior of the Company, which he detests but in whose activities he finds himself implicated. Therefore, alienated and appalled, he attempts to deaden anxiety and secure meaning through a well-developed work ethic, single-mindedly dedicating himself to the task of retrieving and repairing the steamboat. At the same time he distantly hopes that Kurtz, purportedly a morally enlightened man, will somehow redeem him when the recovered boat arrives at the ivory trader’s base of operations far up the river.12 In restoring the boat, however, Marlow and his helper are held up by a lack of rivets, the supplying of which, unsuspected by Marlow at the time, the Manager makes sure is long delayed. One night, in a kind of hysteria induced by frustration and anxiety, Marlow and his fellow worker dance on the deck of the vessel, now raised from the water, celebrating their fantasy that the longed-for rivets surely must be about to arrive: [W]e behaved like lunatics. We capered on the iron deck. A frightful clatter came out of that hulk and the virgin forest on the other bank of the creek sent it back in a thundering roll. . . . The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves,

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boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence. And it moved not. A deadened burst of mighty splashes and snorts reached us from afar as though an ichthyosaurus had been taking a bath of glitter in the great river. (29–30) Here the ichthyosaur plays a different role than in The Woodlanders, although again it functions within the context of Darwinian theory viewed darkly. In his early fiction Conrad uses vegetation to depict a Darwinian struggle for existence, much as does Hardy, but he also imagines vegetation, in the form of jungle, as an alien force fundamentally antagonistic toward humans and something against which, if they are to survive, they must struggle while being ill equipped to do so.13 For implicit within wilderness, understood as non-human reality, figures the greater enemy, an entire cosmos unconcerned with and uncongenial to human ambitions, making the accomplishments of civilization seem petty and transient. With its decentering of humans, now seemingly just another species with no special sanction, Darwinism plays into this anxiety. Marlow feels all this, but at the same time he also reads into nature a disquiet, heightened by his sense of moral culpability, that makes him into the alien, the one not adapted to his environment and not well fitted to the struggle for survival. He displays these attitudes throughout the novel, as he does when on occasion he senses, in contrast, how admirably suited the natives are to the wilderness. They are non-modern, however, and Marlow, typical of his time, connects the “primitive” with savagery—with the abandonment of moral restraints that he fears as an atavistic potential in modern humans and modern civilization. This is another haunting idea that Darwinism helped fuel—that vestiges of earlier stages of evolutionary development not only linger but constitute a potential for degeneration. Nature as epistemic phenomenon, then, is an antagonist, ultimately residing within as much as without, something alien-seeming but uncanny because imbued with repressed or partially repressed human fears, including the fear—consistent with fi n-de-siècle pessimism about the future— that neither the individual nor modernity itself can survive.14 Dark nature threatens to “sweep every little man of us out of his little existence.” The wilderness “moves not,” however, because in fact it is humankind—via a form of extinction Darwin did not anticipate—that through greed and fear and self-alienation someday might produce its own destruction. In dramatizing these anxieties Conrad employs the same conditions as Hardy—extinction, struggle, and failed adaptation—and he too could have made his ichthyosaur representative of a gloomy human destiny, but he does something else instead. Marlow’s remarkable simile transmutes a noise, maybe a hippo disturbed by the commotion on the boat, into the whimsical image of an ichthyosaur

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“taking a bath of glitter in the great river.” Marlow’s disordered state of mind while dancing on the deck partially explains the fanciful scene, but it is so out of keeping with what precedes it, the threat of human extinction, that there must be more going on if the passage is to make sense. Stripped for the moment of overtones of extinction, confl ict, and failed adaptation, the ichthyosaur stands out in contrast to the preceding evocation of hostile nature and to Marlow’s and his species’ dilemmas. What Marlow has done, perhaps in the retelling of his experience rather than at the time, is invest the animal with what he himself lacks during his traumatic African experiences. Whereas he feels alienated and morally sullied, the creature seems pristine, vital, and at home in its world, engaged in the salutary activity of “taking a bath.” The ichthyosaur is a success rather than something that has failed, its bones consigned to a museum. Snorting turns into a grace note and a brute animal into a fairy tale being. This is a relapse to the childhood romance that, briefly surfacing again in early adulthood, had caused Marlow to sign onto the steamboat job in anticipation of splendid and unproblematic adventure (7–8). But the story immediately undermines the reference’s positive signification as it turns to the need for rivets, to the truth that they would not come anytime soon, to the folly and fear of the rest of the novel, and to Marlow’s dubious battle to construct a positive meaning that, like rivets, might hold his world together. Conrad’s ichthyosaur conveys such escapist meaning: a dream of human freedom and ease, of release from fear of death and the burden of consciousness. But Conrad’s novel no more than Hardy’s sustains such a vision; they tell us not to look for God—we are on our own.

VI By means of the culturally resonant subject of ichthyosaurs this chapter has discussed natural history, geology, paleontology, evolutionary theory, professionalized science in general, and, as illustrated by those subjects, various ways in which science and religion involve themselves in the reconstruction of earth history. These subjects are important for better understanding and appreciating the neo-Victorian novels that are the subject of this book. They do not respond to this background with equal degrees of detail and sophistication, and sometimes, as is the nature of fiction, they impressively depart from historical reality. But background is important for distinguishing foreground, even if neo-Victorian fiction proceeds in such a way as to entangle the two—as does Penelope Lively’s The City of the Mind (1991), which I will use not only to relate Victorian reconstruction of history to science and religion, but to re-introduce the quality of wonderment as hallmark of most neo-Victorian novels that draw on and represent these subjects. In one of its scenes City of the Mind imagines Richard Owen examining a fossilized ichthyosaur bone. Although the novel perhaps does not

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assimilate enough Victorian material to qualify readily as a neo-Victorian, this episode occurs in a strong neo-Victorian context because most of the story is set in the 1990s where we share the experiences and the speculative inner life of Mathew Holland, a London architect. Holland designs new buildings but prefers reconstructing old ones. As he travels about London his knowledge of its many architectural styles and of the different periods and influences that produced them releases streams of associations as he muses about the relationship of both his city’s past and present and his own. For Holland consciously and intensely, but for everyone to some degree, time and space co-exist as entanglements: nothing exists in isolation or without history; everything exists in reference to everything else. Looking at London, Holland “sees decades and centuries, poverty and wealth, grace and vulgarity. He sees a kaleidoscope of time and mood: buildings that ape Gothic cathedrals, that remember Greek temples, that parade symbols and images.” He thinks, “We can see nothing for itself alone; everything alludes to something else” (3, 9). The nexus of multiple allusions is the ichthyosaur, which Holland associates with the Royal College of Surgeons and “the Victorian paleontologist Richard Owen, who worked there.” Holland says he cannot walk by the building “without conjuring up dinosaurs” (158). The word “dinosaur” itself was Owen’s creation. The novel conjures up Owen in his study: “The jawbone of an ichthyosaurus is laid upon the desk in front of him. He draws, with small meticulous strokes of the pen, and makes notes. He reads the history of the world in terms of vertebrae, tibia, teeth and claws. Under his hands, the sauria lift from the rock. When he contemplates a stone, he sees the shadow of the creature it conceals.” After his wife interrupts his work he soon “retreats once more to the Jurassic” and writes down what he has learned from ichthyosaur fossils; for example, “a compensation for the want of horizontality of their tail fi n was provided by the addition of a pair of hind paddles. . . . The vertical fi n was a more efficient organ in the rapid cleaving of the liquid element.” When interrupted a second time “he sighs and . . . returns to 1858”; he “lays his hand on his wife’s, and feels her warmth, the blood rushing beneath her skin, the life of her” (82, 84, 160). This scene as it relates to the rest of City of the Mind registers qualities of neo-Victorian novels in general. Christian Gutleben comments that “Penelope Lively’s use of the fossil as the survival of the past in the present is typical of retroVictorian fiction which examines the vestiges of the Victorian tradition in the contemporary culture” (213). Neo-Victorian fiction examines vestiges of history and it also reconnects and reconstructs them, as Owen does in assembling skeletons and interpreting what they say about once living ichthyosaurs. Broken up into several brief parts and strategically interjected into Holland’s story, the scene in question, as Lively fashions it out of historical materials, embodies the neo-Victorian novel’s project of re-creation. But Gutleben’s comparison between what Owen does with ichthyosaur bones and what fiction does with historical material is somewhat inexact.

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Although Owen in a sense reanimates the ichthyosaur, a reconstructed skeleton and the inferences made from it are constrained. Scientifically, there is fi nally only one way to assemble a skeleton that makes sense and only a limited number of things it can mean; fiction has much greater freedom. Owen’s science itself was constrained, a fact that Lively’s scene, set the year before the publication of the Origin, intimates. Owen believed that “[a]lthough the Ideal Form was fleshed-out in increasingly specialised guises . . . the Archetypal pattern remained static” (Desmond, Archetypes 44; emphasis original). The archetype was laid down once and for all, a design by a designer, and Owen could not conceive of a developmental scheme that would violate the orderliness and dignity inherent in this grand design. His adherence to his form of transcendental biology kept him from seeing the strengths of Darwinian theory: the unpredictable, unfi xed nature of evolutionary change driven by the chanciness of natural selection violated the orderliness of a law-bound universe. The City of the Mind, however, models a fluid and surprising universe of mixed “[o]rder and disorder. The order of the heavens, of the points of the compass. . . . The disorder of the world . . . of wind and rain.” However confusing, it is a living world to be evoked rather than precisely fi xed. Trying to draw a horse, a child “cries out in frustration, unable to translate the moving, shining, kicking maelstrom of horses-in-the-head into this willful recalcitrant horse upon a sheet of paper” (47, 29). The passage perhaps self-reflexively comments on the problem of telling the truth about the past, but its further import is what the child has not understood: the freedom of art not only to represent but to create and thereby imaginatively participate in life. It is a lesson that Owen, as he sits at his desk abstracted from the world around him, also probably has not learned. Mathew Holland’s challenge is to make sense out of the materials of his past, much as he tries to do with London’s. Holland has been leading a constrained life, oppressed with guilt about a divorce, the slow erosion of love that produced it, and its effect on his child; nevertheless, his mind has remained vital because of its ability to make historical and present-day connections. Reinforced by the influence of his young daughter’s imaginative and emotional openness, this quality of his mind, though not without fear, suggests to him that reality is fluid, unpredictable, entangled, and irreducible, a reality that figuratively speaking includes wild horses. He characterizes people’s “lives as a web of connections, random and mysterious” (175). Looking at his daughter’s face, he sees her mother and himself there, a connection, but also that “she is a unique being, displaying in each feature, each tendency, her connection with various others. She is . . . a fusion of characteristics and capacities that can never be recreated” (88). In the “web of connections” and individualities people necessarily are led to the unforeseen, as is Holland when he meets a woman named Sarah Bridges in a coffee line and everything changes for him. Understood this way, life is like dreams in which

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we escape “the imprisonment of normal expectation” (70); this happens to Holland in a jumbled dream fi lled with imagery of prehistoric animals. In it he says to a “companion” representing the desired Sarah, “Observe the ichthyosaurus, my dear” (214). In its unpredictably and strangeness, its mixture of randomness and order, the path of any individual existence resembles that of biological evolution and should be understood as an adventure. In this context “Observe the ichthyosaurus” implies more than just an intellectual exercise. Owen experiences the pulse of life only when he leaves off work and feels the warmth of his wife’s hand. But the novel, almost a commentary on its author’s surname, chooses life throughout, and even the extinct ichthyosaur contributes to the greater mutual life that Mathew and Sarah become. When early in their relationship Holland fi rst mentions an ichthyosaur to Sarah, prompted by its connection with Owen and the Royal College of Surgeons, he has only a vague idea of what it was like and she none at all. He usually has a retentive mind, which maybe is why he is abstracted for a moment and then explains, “What was bothering me just now was that I could not remember if an ichthyosaurus is a swimming creature or a sloshing about in the swamps creature.” “Ichthyosaurus. I hope I don’t forget it,” Sarah responds. When they are next together she is able to announce that “Ichthyosauruses swim. . . . Swam, rather” (158, 172). She says she had become “quite absorbed” in the subject. She offers her piece of information as a small gift, and her interest and sharing give Mathew the courage to ask her out again when previously he had been hesitant, unable to tell if she liked him. Her last name is Bridges, and she and Mathew are building one. The ichthyosaur, which accomplishes part of the bridging, improbably comes to represent the possibility of love. But then, after Mathew and Sarah are brought together, the ichthyosaur has fulfi lled its function, as has Richard Owen. Visiting the National Portrait Gallery they come across Owen’s portrait: “‘There!’ she says. ‘Your ichthyosaurus man.’” But they are thinking of each other: “They stand in front of Richard Owen, whom they no longer see. Who has served his purpose, poor man” (210). This statement, one of the few times the narration steps out of Holland’s point of view, means that this element of the past, now creatively absorbed, had done its work and they are free to experience the present. Owen and the ichthyosaur are extinct. The ichthyosaur thus has a double signification: both the pastness of the past and its persistence. The point is to use the past without being fossilized by it; a number of novels in this study demonstrate this idea but particularly The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Sarah’s self-correction about tenses, in which she in fact gets it right the fi rst time before becoming more precise, reflects the novel’s insistence that, despite the pervasiveness of history and the need to remember, the moments we are most alive come when we are immersed in the present, something like an ichthyosaur “rapid[ly] cleaving . . . the liquid element.” It occurs when both past and future recede and connection to a greater life beyond

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the self prevails, though sometimes only after one first makes sense of the past. At the end of The City of the Mind Holland’s daughter wakes up in the dark frightened and he “pulls back the curtain. ‘Look,’ he says. White clouds flowing across a blue-black sky, and the ice green quiver of a single star. The dark geometry of buildings, and the rhythmic jeweled flash of an aircraft tracking overhead. ‘There,’ he says. ‘You’re here, I’m here’” (231). Those are the novel’s fi nal words. We know that Mathew Holland understands the fragility of life: through the potency of love he has restructured the elements of his past without abandoning its lesson—that life means change; it is one of London’s meanings, and one of the ichthyosaur’s. This perhaps makes the experience all the more wondrous, a father’s love in a moment that must pass and yet gestures toward eternity. Most of the novels I discuss in this book convey protagonists’ immersion in the time-arresting, ego-resisting capacity for wonderment, although sometimes it does not fully manifest itself until the narratives’ conclusions and occasionally more as potential than realization; Swift’s Ever After suggests it only indirectly, elegiacally, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman only in conjunction with existential fear. While City of the Mind draws wonder out of a city, most of the other novels in this study locate it in nature. But in either case it is of the mind, as is all human meaning; it is the lesson George Levine derives from Darwin’s vision and art. Visiting a planetarium with his daughter, Holland thinks, “The achievement of thought and sensibility . . . may be unique to earth” (87). If so, then the universe indeed would be, in one important sense, geocentric— the earth being that point at which the cosmos becomes aware of itself and assigns it meaning. Through thought, sensibility, and imagination we look out at a cosmos imprinted with ourselves. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Mont Blanc” concludes by apostrophizing the mountain: “And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, / If to the human mind’s imaginings / Silence and solitude were vacancy? (141–44). Science and religion are two ways people occupy the vacancy and, when the goal is affi rmation of life, enhance rather than degrade the ability to experience enchantment. Even an ichthyosaur can engender this response, part of the repertoire of human reactions that emerge from the past, influence how we understand it, and thereby shape the present and the future.

VII We have seen that the ichthyosaur and what scientists learned about it fed into and were influenced in turn by nineteenth-century reformulations of earth history—the age of the earth, how it has been formed and changed, and the life forms that have inhabited it. As with human history, the history of this planet stretches from fact—what we know has taken place—to the unsettled realm of subjectivity, selectivity, speculation, imagination, and

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fancy. In both kinds of history cultural variables influence interpretation, though the complexities and contingencies of social history shape understanding of the human past even more than they do that of the earth’s. In Penelope Lively’s Booker Prize-winning Moon Tiger (1988), narrator and rogue historian Claudia Hampton visualizes human and personal history, not in terms of a stratified architectural past, the tactic that pervades City of the Mind, but rather through geological strata. In conjunction with their identifying fossils, strata mark chronology, a temporal orderliness that can be traced, and yet they are often jumbled and distorted by manifold geological forces and as such offer, along with their intricacies, an image of an even more contorted human history. History for Claudia Hampton is an imaginative and affective kaleidoscope because it is not only complex but imagined and felt. Like all of the novels considered in this book, Moon Tiger recognizes that received history is not always set, certain, or univocal: “The voice of history, of course, is composite. Many voices; all the voices that have managed to get themselves heard. Some louder than others,” Claudia avers (5). Yet she does not deny that some things are certain—for example, the fact that the nineteenth century changed how we look at the earth. Thus she can say, “the kaleidoscope shakes. The Palaeolithic, for me, is just one shake of the pattern away from the nineteenth century—which fi rst effectively noticed it, noticed upon what they were walking” (3). So, although she acknowledges that “[m]y Victorians are not your Victorians” (2), Victorian history is clear not only about many facts concerning persons, places, and events, but also in regard to many of its trends and tendencies. Neo-Victorian novels entangle, often in self-aware fashion, subjectivity and objectivity, the merely asserted and the verifiable. There is no doubt in Claudia’s mind about the impact of those who uncovered truths about earth history, though she wraps them and their efforts in the subjectivity of romance: “Who could not be attracted to those majestic figures, striding about beaches and hillsides, overdressed and bewhiskered, pondering immensities? . . . Philip Gosse, Hugh Miller and Lyell and Darwin himself” (3). Fictional and factual investigators of nature and earth history, especially those who pursue truth for its own sake, will play increasingly important roles in this book. Because she is “dealing with strata,” Claudia singles out for appreciation “William Smith, the civil engineer whose labours as a canal constructor enabled him to examine the rocks through which his cuttings were driven and their fossil contents, and draw seminal conclusions” (12). Smith was the fi rst to map various geological strata across Britain and to recognize their temporal significance. Cutting through historical strata, neo-Victorian novels map the verities and uncertainties of the past, reconstructing the real and imagining the unreal through a number of tactics, most of them not nearly as direct as plotting the path of a canal. As with neo-Victorian novels in general, those dealing with science and religion employ many tactics in mixing present and past while hybridizing

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contemporary attitudes with nineteenth-century history. There are, however, two broad patterns for structuring this relationship. The fi rst consists of dual narratives set in both contemporary and nineteenth-century worlds; the second, a much larger group, incorporates historical fiction and biographical novels set solely in the nineteenth century, with twentiethor twenty-fi rst-century elements often muted. Double narratives are more likely to employ postmodern or at least free-form approaches in which the impingement of the contemporary on the past and vice versa are blatantly evident and disruptive of conventional understandings of both past and present. Novels with fi xed nineteenth-century settings tend to be more realistic, although they still can be creatively constructed and reflective about the meanings and uses of history; English Passengers is a strong case in point. The City of the Mind employs a double neo-Victorian approach, though the Victorian dimension is only slightly developed. Several intermittent story lines, sketchy but evocative, crop up from different historical periods, not just the Victorian; all of these are loosely connected to thoughts about London’s history that briefly cross Mathew Holland’s mind, such as his association of The Royal College of Surgeons, ichthyosaurs, and Richard Owen. By establishing well-developed double narratives, some neo-Victorian novels incorporate history more fully. Possession, The Biographer’s Tale, Ever After, Ark Baby, and Monkey’s Uncle all adopt this approach, and they share the linking device of Victorian documents or other artifacts that, sometimes through characters’ own historical researches, connect them to history, draw them into consideration of what it means, and influence their lives and self-understandings. But even those novels without double narratives generally reveal a double consciousness in which a present-day point of view fashions and interprets characters, actions, and cultural phenomena; in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, an extreme case, the late 1960s narrator frequently intrudes on his Victorian narrative and fi nally inserts himself as a character within it. In other novels this dual vision is less overt. Such is the case with Angels and Insects, The Voyage of the Narwhale, The Bone Hunter, and Confessing a Murder— novels with fictional protagonists—and with the biographical novels Mr. Darwin’s Shooter, This Thing of Darkness, Love and the Platypus, and Remarkable Creatures. The latter text, one of three novels examined in the next chapter, looks at Mary Anning through a twenty-fi rst-century lens that focuses connections between nineteenth-century-history and earth history, a relationship from which science and religion, singularly or together, struggled to work out a compelling narrative. As this chapter has shown, “the world-renowned” ichthyosaur illuminates this complex dynamic: “Observe the ichthyosaurus.”

3

Fossils and Faith Remarkable Creatures, Ever After, and The Bone Hunter

I The stratified, fossil-fi lled cliffs of Lyme Regis, Dorset, loom up in Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992), in Tom Holland’s The Bone Hunter (2001), and in Tracy Chevalier’s novel about fossil hunter and Lyme resident Mary Anning, Remarkable Creatures (2010). Swift’s and Chevalier’s novels spotlight the ichthyosaur fossils that occupied center stage in the revised story of earth and human history that Anning helped produce, and all three dramatize the preoccupations and problems of characters whose lives become intertwined with fossils and their scientific and cultural significance. Between them these novels separate out strands of significance that fossil and geological fi ndings held for the nineteenth century. Introduced in the previous chapters, these concern the age of the earth, how it was formed and shaped, the relation of humans to other life forms, humanity’s place in the earth’s past and future, the causes and significance of extinctions, randomness and historical contingency, evidence of design in nature, and how to understand God. The three novels capture the excitements and apprehensions of times that often seem, and especially so in neo-Victorian fiction, more intellectually and imaginatively engaged than ours because of their combustible mixture of rationalism, romanticism, conservatism, religion, complacency, activism, and curiosity about itself and its past. Remarkable Creatures is set in the fi rst half the nineteenth century, the Victorian part of Ever After at mid-century, and The Bone Hunter in the late 1870s. Chevalier’s novel takes place long before 1859 and is not concerned with the Darwinian revolution, but the publication of the Origin influences the narrative in Ever After, and The Bone Hunter registers the book’s continued late-Victorian impact. With or without the influence of Darwinism, however, they all recognize that fossils emerge from a cultural as well as a geological matrix, though the degree of excitement they once produced and the novels record is hard for many people today to comprehend. Nevertheless, the human condition can be read in the ichthyosaur’s gaze directed at us by novels that mix present with past, fact with fiction, known with the unknown, and fear with longing for something true and

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abiding. Caught up in this longing are crises of faith that, in various ways, beset the main character of The Bone Hunter, both the Victorian and twentieth-century protagonists of Ever After, and to a degree Mary Anning in Tracy Chavalier’s Remarkable Creatures, although Anning’s religion allows her to surmount doubts.

II Chavalier’s 2010 biographical novel, which traces the life of Anning from pre-teenage years into adulthood, records a time when fossils fi rst came to public attention and paleontology began to develop as a scientific discipline. As explained in Chapter 2, Anning lived in the right place at the right time and possessed the skills requisite for occupying the center of a new scientific and cultural enthusiasm. Whereas at the beginning of the novel she is only one of a few fossil hunters, by its conclusion the beaches at Lyme Regis are populated with them. The novel captures this natural history growth industry and chronicles its increasingly formal and professionalized aspect as William Buckland, Henry De la Beche, William Conybeare, and Charles Lyell—actual geologists and paleontologists mentioned in the previous chapter—begin to visit and rely upon Anning for finding and preparing specimens. A major theme of Remarkable Creatures concerns the obstacles faced by her and by her friend, mentor, and fellow fossil collector Elizabeth Philpot, another historical figure though less well known than Anning. There is historical evidence that Anning experienced a frustrated romantic involvement with an unidentified man, and the novel imagines an affair for her, but the focus is on her relationship with Philpot.1 These two women enjoy scientific successes severely qualified by a maleand class-dominated society and a scientific culture that excludes women. Intrepid and honorable despite this difficult cultural environment, they are two “remarkable creatures” who have escaped historical near-extinction because of recent biographical and literary exertions by authors like Chevalier. 2 Philpot’s and Anning’s alternating fi rst-person narratives make up the novel. The other major theme is the mixture of excitement, confusion, and resistance discoveries of fossilized remarkable creatures produce in Britain during the initial stages of what might be called the golden age of fossils, a period covering much of the nineteenth century. In the postscript to her novel Chevalier comments, “Twenty-fi rst-century attitudes towards time and our expectations of story are very different from the shape of Mary Anning’s life” (309). This statement, applicable to many neo-Victorian novels, refers to rearrangements of narrative chronology, literarily more acceptable today than in Anning’s time, and to what is needed to make intelligible another time and place and the historicized themes the novel develops. As such the novel hybridizes what is known about its subject with present-day interests, attitudes, and requirements. Its

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novelistic weight rests on its double narrative and differing perspectives, on its depiction of female ambition and frustration in a male hegemony, and especially on Anning’s and Philpot’s reactions to the strange new world their passion for fossils reveals to them. Chevalier’s comment about “attitudes toward time” also seems to refer to her dramatization in the lives of her protagonists of how the discovery of fossils, in interaction with what geology was already teaching, changed conceptions of the history of the earth and the human species. The novel works to convey to modern readers this intellectual and imaginative shift. Throughout the novel both Anning and Philpot ask presumed religious and scientific authorities about the meaning of the fossils they collect. To what degree they did this in real life is unknown, but these occasions inform readers about the issues at stake. How are fossils to be comprehended in light of traditional, Bible-centered conceptions about the creation of life; what happens to the idea of the fi xed, unchanging natural order of species endorsed by Aristotelian and Linnaean taxonomy as well as by scripture; and how could the earth be vastly older than the Bible allows? What they hear are evasions or fantasies meant to protect Christian belief. Philpot confronts the local Anglican priest about these matters, but he dismisses them by condescendingly responding that she should just read the Bible. She continues questioning him, and the clergyman, representing the High Church in his unquestioning, untroubled reliance on authority and tradition, tells her “[all] that you see about you is as God set it out in the beginning. He did not create beasts and then get rid of them. That would suggest He had made a mistake” (92, 93). Regarding geological evidence for an earth of great antiquity, she realizes that the priest like others is happy to rest on “Bishop Ussher’s calculation of the world’s age as six thousand years [which they fi nd] comforting rather than limiting and a little absurd” (103). When she asks him why fossils of plants and animals are found inside rocks when Genesis says the rocks came fi rst, he replies, exasperated, that God created fossils “to test our faith” (92–93); here the novel echoes Philip Henry Gosse’s theory put forth in his 1857 book Omphalos, to be discussed in a later chapter. Philpot also talks about extinction with a fossil-collecting nobleman who, less rigid than the priest, tells her that God removes inferior species and replaces them with improved versions, although this leaves her wondering why God would create inferior creatures in the fi rst place. She fi nds fossils disconcerting in their mysterious relation to time. Somewhat like Henry Knight’s experience in Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes, in gazing at an ammonite her imagination destabilizes her identity as the fossil draws her back into expanses of earth history: “I felt for a moment that I was being sucked into its spiral, farther and farther back in time, until the past was lost in the center” (89). Perhaps most of all, fossils called into question the significance and future of humans, a matter that vexes Philpot as she thinks about the

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disinclination of Lyme’s residents to consider the implications of Anning’s discovery of fossilized ichthyosaurs: [F]ew wanted to delve into unknown territory, preferring to hold on to their superstitions and leave unanswerable questions to God’s will rather than fi nd a reasonable explanation that might challenge previous thinking. Hence they would rather call this animal a crocodile than consider the alternative: that it was the body of a creature that no longer existed in the world. This idea was too radical for most to contemplate. Even I, who considered myself open-minded, was a little shocked to be thinking it, for it implied that God did not plan out what He would do with all the animals He created. If He was willing to sit back and let creatures die out, what did that mean for us? Were we going to die out too? Looking at that skull with its huge, ringed eyes, I felt as if I were standing on the edge of a cliff. (81) The cliff is similar to the one from which Henry Knight fi nds himself hanging, and like the eye of the trilobite, the eye of the ichthyosaur imposes a disorienting and disturbing view of the past and future of humanity as well as of individual self-identity. In the novel the eye of the ichthyosaur is even more problematic for Anning than for her friend. At times ichthyosaurs make her uncomfortable and cause her to fall back on her religion for relief. She says of an early find that it “made me feel funny. While working on it I’d begun going to chapel more regularly, for there were times sitting alone in the workshop with it that I got that hollowed-out feeling of the world holding things I didn’t understand, and I needed comfort” (115). The experience reflects an existential negation of personal significance, a “hollowing out” of identity in which she is dehistoricized and overwhelmed by a vision of the vast impersonality of time and space. Such had been Anning’s experience in her fi rst encounter with an ichthyosaur after her brother Joe showed her its skull embedded in a cliff: I stared at that socket and got the feeling it was staring back. . . . I shuddered, one of them shivers that come over you when you’re not even cold but you can’t stop yourself. . . . It made me feel odd looking at that eye. . . . Sometimes I got that hollowed-out feeling too when looking at a sky full of stars or into the deep water. . . . It was as if the world were too strange for me ever to understand it. (58–59) Soon after this fi rst encounter “[b]its of loose shale tumbled down the cliff and fell near us. We looked up and stepped back, but nothing further came down” (59). Both the ichthyosaur and the rock slide intimate the strangeness of a universe in which humans are not in control, a defamiliarized and

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uncanny reality of randomness and unpredictability. The tumbling shale is characteristic of the cliffs, destabilized by their multiple strata and erosion, in which she explores for fossils; these layers—“granite, limestone, slate, sandstone, and chalk” (131)—made them prime fossil-hunting locations while illustrating the understanding of stratigraphy and corresponding evidence for an ancient earth that geologists were in the process of developing. But the timing and character of landslides are unpredictable, the result of a myriad of contingencies. The fall of shale anticipates Anning’s ordeal later in the novel of being caught in a landslide along the cliffs. In that accident, in which she is mostly buried and expects to die, its chance nature is reinforced by the position of her head, mostly clear of mud and rubble, that directs her gaze once more into the eye of an ichthyosaur that the landslide has suddenly exposed: “my eyes flicked over the stones near to me and come to rest on a familiar shape about four feet from me: a ring of overlapping bony scales the size of my fist. A croc’s [icthyosaur’s] eye. It were like it was staring straight at me. . . . Then, several feet past the eye, there was a movement” (143).3 What Anning sees is the fi nger of a fellow fossil hunter named Captain Curry who likewise has been caught in the landslide, entirely buried except for the fi nger that soon stops moving. She thus encounters death in the forms of an extinct creature, a fellow human being, and what seems to be her imminent fate. And again the fate of ichthyosaurs becomes attached to that of humans: “Between me and Captain Curry the croc eye watched us both. Captain Curry and I are going to be like the croc, I thought. We will become fossils, trapped upon beach [sic] forever” (144). Unlike what Henry Knight experiences, for Anning this fossil does not hint at expansion of organic identity but only at what he also feels: being fi xed and negated as a fleeting expression of life. Neo-Victorian novels like Remarkable Creatures reconstruct how remarkable fossils must have been, and sometimes how disquieting, for those who fi rst seriously considered their import as it was impressed upon them by discovery of the great extinct reptiles beginning with the ichthyosaur. Although the discoveries are represented as disquieting to a few, the novel does not relate serious religious doubts among the people or denominations—“Lyme was full of Dissenters, though it had a proper [Anglican] church too” (50)—present in Anning’s conservative, early nineteenth-century hometown. She is able to overcome her hollowed-out feeling by going to the chapel. She experiences momentary crises of faith in her own significance but no lasting challenge to her religion. Anning’s lower-class status, poverty, gender, and a failed love affair all test her sense of self-validity but she remains resolute because her experience of God, only loosely connected with religious doctrine or practice, reinforces her identity and moral being by removing those forces that would damage her constructive relationships with her social and natural worlds. Her friend Elizabeth also is not greatly troubled by the implications of fossils, never going much beyond puzzlement over God’s ways that cause her at one point to say she “had sent many

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prayers to God that had gone unanswered, and [I] wondered sometimes whether or not my prayers had been received and heard at all” (59, 36). In contrast, the enthusiastic, quirky, sympathetic figure of geologist William Buckland, an Anglican priest, labors—as a character just as he did in real life—to reconcile geology with religion and especially with the biblical story of the flood. Anning asks him if the ichthyosaur “is one of the creatures Noah brought on his ark?” and “Why would God make creatures that don’t exist anymore?” (128, 129). Buckland admits the problem but says that “[g]eology is always to be used in the service of religion, to study the wonders of God’s creation and marvel at His genius. . . . God in his infinite wisdom has peppered this world with mysteries for men to solve. This is one of them” (130). Later Philpot receives a copy of Buckland’s essay entitled The Connexion of Geology with Religion Explained (196).4 The novel does not explain its content, but this polemic, published in 1820, promotes the new science of geology and attempts, as did many other nineteenthcentury publications, to reconcile an ancient earth with the Bible. It does this especially by arguing that the word “beginning” in Genesis 1.1 (“In the beginning . . . ) refers to an unspecified but vast amount of time prior to God’s biblical activity; this approach avoids the challenge to literalism posed by the argument that each of the six “days” of creation represents an epoch of great duration. Buckland’s theory allows time for the creation and extinction of species prior to the present-day ones whose creation is described in Genesis. Therefore the strange plants and animals imprinted in fossils become explicable. But Anning does not require such rationalizations: the amazing productions of nature justify themselves by the simple fact of their past and present existence. The novel ends by reasserting its major theme: interconnectedness realized through friendship and through immersion in the lives of the nonhuman. Anning and Elizabeth Philpot had suffered a period of estrangement but renew their friendship, whereupon Philpot insists on erasing class differences by telling Mary to call her simply by her fi rst name. Anning, who narrates the last section of the novel, says that “[i]t felt odd not saying Miss” (298). The novel’s conclusion stresses, through the removal of conceptual barriers, the connection of all “remarkable creatures,” human to human and human to other forms of life. Thus the last sentence of the novel: “we continued, arm in arm along the beach, talking until at last we had no more to say, like a storm that blows itself out, and our eyes dropped to the ground, where the curies were waiting for us to fi nd them” (299). The fossils, which “were waiting,” represent life rather than death. Remarkable Creatures personalizes the nineteenth-century intellectual and spiritual drama of fossils, even though it does not, like some other neoVictorian novels, provoke outright crises of faith in its characters; many believers in the 1800s avoided spiritual travail, ignoring the implications of fossils or of anything else that would affect religious faith. Chevalier’s novel entails no belittlement of religion—only of religious narrow-mindedness.

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There were enough mysteries about the history of life and enough faith in human reason that serious people, including natural theologians like Buckland, could believe that science and religion would, through research and logic, be brought into harmony in recognition of humans’ central position in a divinely created universe. In Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992), however, crises of faith—not just in God but in the meaningfulness of life and of humanity itself—leave little room for apprehending the specialness of either humanity or the universe. The Victorian character of Matthew Pearce looks into the eye of an ichthyosaur but unlike Mary Anning feels his religious faith begin to erode along with his former identity; in the twentieth century Bill Unwin comes to lack faith in himself or in anything that can make life meaningful. In Swift’s novel, the centerpiece of this chapter, the ichthyosaur assumes new significations as its discovery ramifies in all directions.

III The title of Ever After of course derives from fairy tales and refers specifically to romantic love, an ideology based on a metaphysical, quasi-religious structure of faith that connects it to the transcendence of life’s difficulties and to the longing for eternal life important for all of the world’s major religions. As told by Bill Unwin—the novel’s primary narrator who inherits from his mother the notebooks of ancestor Matthew Pearce along with one of his letters—when Pearce meets his future wife, Elizabeth, his belief in “ever after” still applies to romantic love but no longer, because of his having seen an ichthyosaur, to religion. Unwin characterizes Pearce’s meeting of Elizabeth as replete with “[t]he augeries of happy-ever-afters” as he “[f]alls in love, heavily, thickly, thankfully” (118, 119). The emblem of their love is the clock Pearce’s clock-maker father constructs for the newlyweds inscribed with the motto “Amor Vincit Omnia” (52), love conquers all, an ironic comment in light of the affliction that eventually will blight Pearce’s marriage. At this point, however, his doubt or lack of faith has not yet developed into atheism or into the outspokenness that will become an affront to those around him. Brought up as a devout Christian, he lives at a time and place when most people unreflectively accepted their versions of Christianity. Unwin says that although Pearce attends Oxford during a period of great religious ferment there he ignores the controversies swirling around the Oxford Movement (108–09)—the push to move the Anglican Church in the direction of Catholic-like authority and traditionalism—which enacted a drama that people of various Christian persuasions and throughout Britain followed with interest. Instead, he graduates from Oxford believing in natural theology with its evidences of God’s designs in nature supported by what he sees in his new career as a surveyor. Unwin reconstructs the matter this way:

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Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels And now, in 1840, after three years’ exposure to scholarly skepticism and the rigours of science, he would not have relinquished the belief that every word [the Bible] contained was the literal and immutable truth. . . . [which] meant that the profounder questions of existence were settled and one was free to go out on to the surface of the world. . . . [It] brought you back to the central fact: nature’s handiwork, and man’s too, since it exploited the unchanging laws that were part of nature’s design, was evidence of God’s. (102–03).

Obstacles to Pearce’s unbelief are compounded by his wife being a believer, as most defi nitely is his father-in-law, an Anglican priest. But because he is a surveyor working with engineers and drawn to mechanistic, materialist problems and explanations; because he has experiential fi rsthand geological knowledge obtained in his career; and because he is intellectually curious and committed to truth, for these reasons and perhaps some others he increasingly will become aware of the mounting scientific evidence exposing the explanatory inadequacies of the Bible. Further affected by the death of his two-year-old son Felix, he will slide from doubt into atheism and disgrace. The deterrents to Christian belief posed by geology and paleontology, obstacles the novel organizes around the idea of an ichthyosaur, only indirectly affect Bill Unwin; however, the attendant themes of the semireligious nature of romantic love and of losing faith in what had made life meaningful carry over into Unwin’s narrative and help explain his interest in Pearce. Perhaps his ancestor’s experiences will help him come to terms with his own problems. Therefore Pearce’s story and his loss of faith allow Unwin, in his own pain and emotional destitution caused by a history of assaults on his identity and self-worth, to spin out and color his ancestor’s story according to his needs and inclinations. He also continually references literary characters and narratives, but that of Hamlet particularly, to much the same end, seeking “stories [to] provide him with workable formal parameters within which he can desensitize himself to painful engagements with the real and distressing stuff of his life” (Lea, “Feigning” 157). Unwin’s quotations of Pearce’s words might seem to stand on their own as fact, and readers of the novel can employ them as such, but Unwin selects and intersperses them throughout his own narrative while translating portions of the Pearce documents into his own words. As Unwin himself recognizes but then rejects the idea, his own commitment to romantic love, which he believes was realized in his relationship with his now deceased wife, perhaps causes him to heighten or partially create Pearce’s great love for his wife that Pearce’s loss of faith was destined to violate (225–26, 236). The twentieth-century narrator’s frequent admissions about gaps in his knowledge, his often revised interpretations, and his complex orchestrations of historical knowledge foster suspicion about his narrative reliability while, in metafictional fashion, intimating that fiction distorts fact and to some degree fact often becomes

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fictionalized in its telling. Certainly Unwin fictionalizes Matthew Pearce, calling him a “hybrid being” composed of the known and the imagined (100), a condition mirroring the hybridity of neo-Victorian fiction in general. Thus readers are invited to consider their own interventions in the fictionalized reality of the novel. As he admits on numerous occasions, Unwin feels the instability between fact and fiction and between the knowable and unknowable, an instability reflecting his inability to achieve a stable, coherent identity maintained through self-bolstering belief in what he repeatedly characterizes as “the real thing”: the ideal of romantic love that had structured his relationship with his deceased wife, shaped his recollections of it, or both. Unwin’s interpretations of his and Pearce’s lives resemble reading the fossil record, trying to reconstruct the past despite gaps in evidence, uncertain relationships, and historically and psychologically contingent ideas brought to bear in trying to understand it; the complexities of human nature, however, appear even more resistant to simple explanations than those of physical nature. Whatever his innate predispositions, Unwin’s life is powerfully influenced by events and contingencies: his emotionally entrapping mother, Sylvia; his enabling role as a boy, through silence about what he knows, in the cuckolding of the man he believes to be his father; that man’s suicide when Unwin is nine; his confused hostility toward Sam, his stepfather whom he likes but whose affair with his mother possibly caused the suicide; his function as a seemingly unessential attendant upon the career of his beloved wife, Ruth, a famous actress; the deaths of Ruth, Sylvia, and Sam; his learning that the man he thought his father was perhaps not; and, fi nally, the dispiriting gift of a university position, in effect bought for him through Sam’s endowment of a fellowship, that requires nothing of him and excludes him from the teaching he would like to do. Sam made his money through plastics, which represent the modern ubiquity of substitutes for authenticity such as that Unwin believes he had experienced through love for his wife. He attempts suicide but fails, another un-win. Then in the midst of what appears to him a spectral afterlife—he resembles a sort of incipient fossil, a trace of life awaiting extinction—he decides to author a scholarly book based his ancestor’s notebooks and letter, fending off a colleague who claims he deserves the documents because he, unlike Unwin, is not only a bona fide historian but a specialist on “the spiritual crisis of the mid nineteenth century” (177). Unwin does background research but then cannot bring himself to begin the book and fi nally turns over the Pearce writings to his rival. All of this is very gloomy of course. What saves the reader from grimness is the compelling way in which Unwin tells his story, an effort directed toward gaining self-credibility in the present by understanding and connecting with the past and projecting himself into the future through writing—a qualified form of ever after that gives him the chance, as part of his own, to tell Pearce’s story as well; he understands such motivation as a possible

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reason for both his and Pearce’s writing (245–46, 221). And Unwin’s desire to write something of value is connected with his own love of literature, which he powerfully avows as another form of the real thing. Pointing to Unwin’s use of religious phrases to refer to literature, Stef Craps notes his endowment of it “with the redemptive power traditionally associated with religion” (125). Moreover, “[l]iterature’s usurpation of the position of religion is . . . underscored by the structural parallel between Bill’s life story and that of Matthew Pearce,” with the difference that although “Bill seeks refuge in literature in the wake of his father’s suicide, Matthew turns to religion for consolation after his mother’s demise” (126). In general, however, Craps sees Unwin struggling to give up replacements for a reality that necessarily entails limitations and loss, and he “fi nally abandons his exclusive claim to the notebooks [of Pearce]” when “his encounter with Matthew puts into question his sense of self and his totalizing tendencies” and “the narcissistic search for completion turns out to be a futile and pernicious undertaking” (144). It seems to me, however, that love for wife or literature or history should not be reduced entirely to pathological symptoms; people and their motivations are complex. But I agree with Craps that Unwin displays a latent desire to escape from escapism. Despite Unwin’s depression, countervailing forces also are apparent that evidence a commitment to life: the wit and vitality of the fi rst-person narration he produces in lieu of working on his projected book; his intelligence, imagination, and breadth of knowledge; the people he interestingly writes about; his love of literature that appears sincere; and his struggle with the mysteriousness of an existence fraught with the intriguing complexities that inform history personal, cultural, and natural.

IV It is natural history, as it merges with geological and paleontological concern about the history of the earth, that unalterably changes the life of Matthew Pearce, a story told both in his own words and in Unwin’s glosses and speculative reconstructions. The process begins in 1844 when Pearce, after graduating from Oxford and before meeting his wife, while on holiday in Lyme Regis visits a half-buried ichthyosaur that workers for Mary Anning are excavating from a cliff. Unwin, who provides information about the historical context of the Pearce story, comments that this occurs only two years before Anning’s death from breast cancer and outlines Anning’s career, pointing out that she unlike Pearce did not succumb to the faitheroding potential of her work (154–55). The detail of Pearce’s looking into the eye of the creature comes via Unwin rather than directly from any of the notebook passages he shares, but he quotes his ancestor’s description of the galvanic effect the ichthyosaur had on him in what Pearce calls “the moment

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of my unbelief” (112). The novel shows itself aware that this experience is pre-Origin—a reaction, not at all reliant on Darwinian theory, potentially available to anyone of the time familiar with early nineteenth-century geology. At least two critics, however, identify Pearce’s experience with the ichthyosaur as specifically Darwinian (MacLeod 375; Gutleben, “Shock” 139), an understandable mistake, so central is Darwin to science-related neo-Victorian fiction. But Swift is well attuned to actual or “canonical” history even as he explores realms of historical uncertainty as in the case of Unwin’s need to reconstruct and revise his understanding of Pearce’s life in general and of his ancestor’s experience with the ichthyosaur in particular. Pearce faces Anning’s discovery at the same moment a young woman down the path he has come by slips, falls, and cries out, but while others who had been looking at the fossil go running to help her Pearce remains behind, having, in Unwin’s words, “chose[n] to stare into the eye of a monster” (99). And then he goes tearing down the path toward the beach and past the group surrounding the woman: The sudden cry . . . so that everyone rushed . . . to attend to the accident, leaving me alone with the creature. Why did I not rush too? To assist the damsel in distress. A little common gallantry might have saved me. Yet I know . . . that what followed was not a moment of unreasoned panic and confusion but a moment of acute perspicacity. Truly I was to rush too, a little while after the others . . . quite past the little group helping the young lady. . . . But of what little note to me was this touching scene of mere human misfortune. . . .” (110–11, emphasis and fi nal ellipsis original) Gestated during Pearce’s education in geology and biology and no doubt influenced by his familiarity with the biblical account of events now contradicted by new evidence, this moment, a mishap Pearce says he wishes he could have avoided, represents a much greater slip and fall than the girl’s. It is a fall from grace. Suddenly the fate of “mere humans” seems inconsequential within the cold, uncaring, and godless universe the fossil discloses to him. Why he takes off running is not entirely clear, but it appears a visceral response to a loss of self corresponding to the loss of those things that had once defi ned or solidified it. In an explanation that suggests Mary Anning’s sense of hollowness as described in Remarkable Creatures—Swift’s wellknown novel might well have influenced Chevalier’s—Unwin concludes that Pearce, feeling a connection to the extinct ichthyosaur, saw “[t]he long, toothed jaw; the massive eye that stares through millions of years. He is the creature; the creature in him. He feels something open up inside him, so that he is vaster and emptier than he ever imagined, and feels himself starting to fall, and fall, though himself” (112). Almost certainly Unwin recognizes or reads into Pearce’s situation his own fall, which occurred when his

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presumed father shot himself, an event he says changed and “moulded” his life and that he connects to his loss of innocence (63–64, 172). Unwin wishes to imagine, to re-create his ancestor’s experience, as authentic—an engagement with “the real thing” he fi nds lacking in the modern world and in himself, something lost in his childhood and again in the loss of his wife. The ichthyosaur itself takes on this signification. He calls the fossil the workers are excavating “the thing itself” and contrasts it with specimens in the “safe, orderly, artificial” spaces of museums (110). Here we see the irreconcilable aspects of Unwin’s desire: on the one hand he wants “[s]tability . . . an intuitive sense that all things must have their basis” (101) that he associates with Pearce’s early career as a surveyor and engineer, and on the other he recognizes that it is not to be found in some safe and orderly phase of his own past nor in Pearce’s before he sees the ichthyosaur and loses the comfort of his religious faith. Perhaps only suicide can bridge the gap. Unwin also wants to offset the inauthenticity he associates with his life and times with a genuineness he hopes to fi nd in Pearce’s Victorian world, thereby erasing a divide both temporal and psychological. He describes Pearce’s moment of seeing the ichthyosaur, of seeing “the thing itself,” as “Here. Now. Then” (111), thereby expressing his habitual doubts about escaping into the past or into any world alternate to his own. Describing the impossibility of moving outside the present to grasp a historically and linguistically unmediated “thing itself,” Mariadele Boccardi says that Anning’s laborers who excavate the ichthyosaur “to place it within the artificial environment of the museum are figures of Unwin himself, excavating the life of his ancestor to re-locate it in a readable context whose parameters of interpretation are already established. Thus, the crisis of faith recorded in the journal Unwin is editing . . . acquires the typicality and representative value of the confi rmation of an already present structure of signification” (92).5 Pearce identifies his epiphany as a source of personal inauthenticity; he says his confrontation with the ichthyosaur represents not only “the moment of my unbelief” but “the beginning of my make-belief” (112) because for sixteen years he hides his religious doubts from his wife and, during the early years of his marriage, largely even from himself as he undergoes a protracted crisis of faith that he reveals in his notebooks and, indirectly, in his initially restrained philosophical-theological discussions with his conservative father-in-law. Referring to the ichthyosaur, he writes, “How different my present powers of patience, of humble submission to Providence, had I not taken that journey [to Lyme Regis]. God knows how much since then I have pretended. God knows!—but there, in a phrase, is the essence of my pretense” (110). If there is no great faith beforehand there can be no true crisis of faith. Some Victorians whose faith came into crisis never recovered from the ordeal, never stopped mourning for paradise lost. Whether or not Pearce would have avoided spiritual crisis had he never seen the ichthyosaur is unknowable.

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Both Unwin and Pearce, however, understand the latter’s downfall as the result of his bad luck in having come across the ichthyosaur, a matter of chance consistent with “the random universe” (248) that Unwin perceives in opposition to his longing for the design and meaningfulness of romantic love that Pearce abandons. The death of Pearce’s ironically named son Felix confi rms the devastated father in his vision of the overwhelming randomness of things: “I cannot believe that in this prodigious arbitrariness there is any purpose that grants life to a child only to withdraw it after two years; that it is not the case, rather, that he might as well not have existed; that he holds, in truth, in the great course of things, no place, value or identity compatible with the vain fabric of loving recognition that I, that we all, have built around him” (113). As most parents sense, love is a “vain fabric” for protecting a child, but in Pearce’s case the inadequacy of parental love, when coupled with the lesson of the ichthyosaur, undermines romantic love, marital love, love of God, love of God’s Creation, and everything else he relied upon for solidity and meaning. What remains is what he conceives as the core of his ethical identity—that he is remaining true to the truth that has been revealed to him, whatever the cost—and the cost is great for himself and his family in their “mere human misfortune.” Some element of humanity has been lost to him. Unwin makes a connection between Pearce’s loss of faith and that of the entire Victorian era. Consistent with many social historians’ understanding of the period, Unwin characterizes the mid-nineteenth century as “the high tide of Victorian endeavour” (141), an era of confidence and seeming stability after the economic, social, and political disruptions of earlier decades. As a surveyor Pearce works with Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the most celebrated of engineers in an age of heroic engineering, on the Great Western Railway and in particular on the awe-inspiring Saltash bridge across the Tamar estuary that some thought could never be built. Like the work Pearce accomplishes as a surveyor, the bridge speaks of stability and, if not ever after, of a longevity that intimates eternity for short-lived humans. In his story the romantic confidence implicit in the building of railways, the most dynamic and life-altering development of the nineteenth century, combines with the British self-confidence manifested in Great Exhibition of 1851, to which Pearce and his wife, happily anticipating the birth of Felix, travel on her fi rst train trip. With the dramatic irony that tragic foreknowledge allows, Unwin tells that this time, this “high tide of Victorian endeavour,” coincides with “the high tide of Matthew and Elizabeth’s marriage” (141). The life of both couple and nation will be shaken, and the forbidden fruit of scientific knowledge that poisons Pearce, though initially seeming to herald a wondrous future, is one of the factors that will darken the mood of Victorian civilization as the century wears on. Darwinian evolution is, in the main, such a factor, and it is The Origin of Species that will deliver the death blow to Pearce’s marriage, already in mortal peril, and to what he describes as “the ten happiest and most fragile years of my life” (133).

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But even before encountering Darwinism Pearce has carefully been committing to his notebook the problems that science poses for traditional Christian belief. His dated entries present a man who, compelled by compulsion to know the truth, must investigate a subject he recognizes as the enemy of happiness. Some of the entries offer both sides of a science-religion debate as he weighs contradictory evidence and works toward understanding. The result of this process, influenced especially by his reading of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, is that Pearce gradually winnows out a number of detriments to faith whether based on biblical or natural theology. The arbitrariness of the universe he apprehends in Felix’s death is a major one intertwined with others. The ancientness of the earth in relation to human significance is another, closely related difficulty. Acknowledging “the immense periods of Geological Time,” Pearce entertains the idea, well known by his day and popular with neo-Victorian authors, “that aeons elapsed before the Creator made Man before the world became such as we see it to be, and that the six days of Genesis are properly to be counted in millions of years.” This premise leads to the conclusion that “the entire record of human history is as a wink in the world’s duration” and to the question, “if the world existed so long without Man upon it, why should we suppose that futurity holds for us any guaranteed estate and that we occupy any special and permanent place in Creation?” (146). The problem of impermanence links up with that of extinction. For example, Pearce asks, “Is the Creator to be viewed as a mere Experimenter?” (145). These are problems Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot encounter in Remarkable Creatures. But Pearce goes far beyond their speculations. For example, he recognizes the great wastefulness of a natural order fi lled with death and destruction, not just in the geological past but ongoing in the present; he describes nature as “a pitiless arithmetician and gross cozener, hiding behind her bountiful appearance the truth the greater portion of Creation exists only as a tribute to Destruction” (148). Another area of perturbation concerns why reproduction often produces imperfections and why God allows them (153). Bill Unwin gives fair play to these and other constituents of Matthew Pearce’s crisis of faith and thereby captures the religious doubts of many Victorians especially in the years following mid-century and the “high tide” of civilization represented by the Great Exhibition. This was a time when the fi rst remains of ancient humans and The Origin of Species appeared, creating a new or further disturbance to some people’s belief in a secure and reliable universe. Pearce’s discussions with his father-in-law become increasingly confrontational as the young man presses his growing skepticism on the mild-mannered vicar who fi nds himself less and less able to countenance aff ronts to his religion including his belief in God’s immanence manifested in nature’s designs. Darwin catalyzes the final break; the Origin offers explanation for all Pearce had found inexplicable from a religious standpoint, and he assaults the believer with natural selection’s capacity for producing design

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without a designer. Exactly how the crisis comes about remains unclear—it is one of the hiatuses in his ancestor’s story that Unwin tries fictionally to fill in without much faith in his efforts—but in Pearce’s account the Vicar issues some sort of ultimatum, the son-in-law returns home with the news, conflict erupts between him and Elizabeth, and apparently he forces her to choose between himself and his atheism on the one hand and her father, religion, and convention on the other (193–95). It appears Pearce wants the split to occur despite, by all accounts, still loving his family. When Elizabeth cannot accept the situation he leaves, an action that because of recently enacted laws allows her eventual divorce from him on grounds of abandonment (225). Women being given the right to divorce on this basis was considered liberal at the time, a measure stoutly objected to by traditionalists. The past is both different from the present but also similar because its influence persists. Whether of the earth or human affairs, history mixes continuity with discontinuity, the relative ascendency of one over the other dependent on phenomena selected and time scales applied.

V Unwin recognizes connections and disconnections between his situation and that of Pearce, or at least of the Pearce he re-creates through his imagination. These are emblematized in the wedding-gift clock (“Amor Vincit Omnia”), handed down to him through the generations, and the idea of romantic love as that idea, like the clock, persists through time but also, because of the different contexts it occupies, within the variability and unpredictability of history. As noted, the romantic love Unwin sees as once embracing both his and Pearce’s marriages represents a major source of Unwin’s interest in the other’s story. Although generally cynical about human nature, Unwin remains a romantic. He knows that romantic love has been intellectualized and historicized as a cultural construct—“Romantic love. A made-up thing” (121)—but at one time or another he endorses the magical constituents of the ideal: that it is “ever after”; that it “was meant to be” (84); that it singles out the one and only (“only Ruth will do” [131]); that amor vincit omnes/love conquers all; and that it is “the real thing” that he repeatedly invokes. Permeating popular culture and the hopes of most people in the West, romantic love represents a connection between Victorian times and now, and its continuing application to marriage likewise is a legacy of the nineteenth century, the fi rst fully to understand the two as natural complements rather than two largely distinct realms, one a matter of emotion and faith and the other of legality and economics. And no doubt romantic love sometimes served Victorians as a substitute for traditional religion and still serves that function—the idea famously crystallized in “Dover Beach.” Unwin does not overtly make these points, but they are implicit throughout his story.

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The romantic ideal is the crux of Unwin’s own crisis of faith that in some ways resembles Pearce’s. Both experience a moment of unbelief that darkens the rest of their lives, Pearce when he beholds the ichthyosaur and Unwin when he learns about the death of the man thought to be his father. To a degree Unwin’s love for his spouse, his allegiance to romantic love, compensates for this loss, although seemingly it also replicates for him his sensual relationship with his emotionally seductive mother who, in her dramatic and vital manner, anticipates his actress wife and perhaps explains much of his attraction to her. But Unwin feels an absence that incapacitates him, undermining self-confidence, thereby leading to an overdetermined insistence on the transformative magic of love. Pearce also has a void to fi ll because of the early death of his mother who, he lovingly remembers, read to him from the family Bible that he must have continued to associate—he keeps the book to the end of his life despite becoming an atheist—with the love and security that her death began to unravel and that he keeps alive only for a while through love for his wife and family. But in Ever After fathers are even more important than mothers in their responsibility for sending sons in search of “the real thing,” whether it be romantic love or a mechanistic universe, and here again the two men’s situations are similar in ways that help explain Unwin’s preoccupation with Pearce’s story. Unwin’s crisis of faith begins with the suicide of a father whom he felt he had betrayed, and whose death he felt responsible for, because of keeping silent about his mother’s infidelity that might have sparked the tragedy when her husband discovered the truth. So as a boy Unwin now feels compensatory loyalty to the father while, because that father had always been remote and is now dead, needing all the more the father figure he fi nds but abjures in his stepfather Sam, whom Unwin blames along with himself for the suicide and whom he resents as rival for his mother. Unwin repeatedly identifies his life as an Oedipal tangle—a parallel to Hamlet, which intertextually permeates Unwin’s narrative— consisting of dead father, stepfather, contended-for mother, and divided and incapacitated son. Critics of Ever After have in detail psychologized the complex relationships between these characters. The point here is that the father’s death brings the end of innocence—of faith in the goodness of life, in the reliability of the future, and in the son’s own worth—and as such it roughly parallels Pearce’s encounter with the ichthyosaur. “My father! My father!” Unwin cries out (220). Like Unwin’s dead father—if indeed he was his father—Pearce’s living one also has an important influence on what happens to his son. The harddriving Pearce senior, who despite being only a craftsman sends his son to Oxford, pushes him toward success and then berates him for becoming a mere surveyor, in his eyes just a superior form of laborer (218). Therefore Pearce’s vicariously ambitious and censorious father, it appears, provides some motivation for the son’s need to provoke his father-in-law and overthrow God the Father. Also, his father’s earlier loss of faith provides a model,

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something like that Unwin’s father offers for suicide. Nevertheless, Pearce’s abandonment of wife and family, his violation of love’s requisites, remains a mystery to his chronicler; he admits he does not understand him (144). For Mariadele Boccardi this gap in comprehension characterizes Unwin’s postmodern condition: “the difficulties inherent in the paucity and discontinuity of the records of the past are compounded by the intellectual and affective chasm that separates Unwin from the subject of his research. Both the nature of the Victorian man’s spiritual crisis and the rigorous integrity with which he adheres to his beliefs are alien to the spiritually empty world described in the contemporary narrative” (88). Certainly Pearce’s break with his family seems undermotivated to readers—a mystery of individuality and psychological complexity that history offers insufficient evidence for explaining. One reason it is a mystery to Unwin, however, is a matter of his personal psychology, in that Pearce throws away what Unwin prizes most. The major difference between ancestor and descendant lies in what constitutes the real thing: for Pearce it is what he embraces as truth; for Unwin it is what he comprehends as love. In some ways Pearce’s situation is better than that of Unwin, who continually doubts his ability to understand or tell the truth, unlike Pearce whose moral identity is bolstered by his belief that his sacrifices are in the service of truth. The death of his wife, Ruth, produces in effect a second crisis of faith for Unwin—its seeds planted many years before by the death of his father—because his imaginative and emotional investment in romantic love no longer suffices. His wife is dead and he lacks the religious faith that would allow him to believe their separation temporary or at least playing some role in God’s greater scheme of love—to believe that “ever after” still applies. But like those Victorians who lost faith and never ceased regretting it, Unwin too in his way had long regretted the absence of divinity, some transcendent basis on which the claims of romantic love, with its sense of life’s meaningfulness, can rest. “[I]f we do not have souls, why should we have these—feelings? These moments that rack and enrapture us and take us by storm. Why should things matter?” he asks (200). But they do matter, and for him it is love that matters most. He has tried and failed to understand how things mattered so deeply to Pearce that he creates misery for himself and those he loves along with a scandal, over abandonment and divorce, the depth of which can hardly be comprehended today. Unwin has had to use his imagination, as in much else, about the scene of the fi nal break of Pearce and his father-in-law that Pearce leaves unrecorded: “You have to reconstruct the moment, as patient palaeontolgists reconstruct the anatomies of extinct beasts,” Unwin says (197). But the reconstruction of bones is easier than reconstructing the aversions and desires of the human heart. In the last part of the novel Unwin reconstructs the beautiful and poignant story of meeting Ruth, of falling in love, and of their fi rst night together. It is the story of “[r]omantic, impossible love” (129). Is he telling it truthfully? The many doubts he voices about

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being able accurately to narrate Pearce’s history might well apply to telling his own. It hardly matters; he wishes to celebrate love and this he does. The novel could end like that, since Unwin apparently has left the story of his own love until the last as an endorsement of what matters and of the power of narrative to produce coherence and closure; the lack of an ever after might be ignored. The last two paragraphs of the novel, however, change everything. During their initial night of love Unwin tells Ruth “what he had never told anyone before, about his—father. That he took his life”—using the third person that already distances the story from himself and consigns it to what he understands as an irretrievable past. This recollection deflects him from his romantic narration, away from the shared intimacy of perfect love and back to the focus of his devastation. Hence—echoing the earlier “My father! My father!”—occur the fi nal words of the novel: “He took his life, he took his life” (276). Along with their fi nality and abruptness, the repetition and phrasing of these last words invite interpretation. Obviously, Ever After does not end with “and they lived happily ever after”—that idea is exploded. Pearce’s recollections fi nally serve, it appears, not to unite but to separate romantic love from reality, and it is quite possible he again will attempt the suicide his supposed father had modeled for him long before; perhaps these are literally his last words. Furthermore, how he expresses the idea—neither “he killed himself,” “he shot himself,” nor “he committed suicide”—lets the repeated statement apply not just to his father, and maybe proleptically to himself—or to both of them, with a different referent for each “he”—but also to Matthew Pearce who from Unwin’s point of view “took his life” and threw it away.6 In words whose repetition connect them to his fi nal statement of bafflement about his own life, on two occasions Unwin expresses his bemused consternation over Pearce’s inexplicable reaction upon seeing a mere fossil. “But with an ichthyosaur? An ichthyosaur,” he exclaims, and later: “an ichthyosaur. An ichthyosaur” (111, 154; emphasis original). Variations in these repetitions seem to stress Unwin’s incomprehension: question and non-question, stressed and non-stressed. In any event, although Unwin’s crisis of faith is not directly influenced by science and does not involve religion as normally understood, he nevertheless is like Pearce. The suicide for Unwin and the fossil for Pearce are similar because each represents something that is an undeniable historical fact and that, though now gone, leaves powerful traces to disturb the present. For both protagonists crises of faith, destroying old beliefs, motivate their desire to secure what really matters, a desire ultimately frustrated in Unwin’s case and left unrealized in Pearce’s.7 The neo-Victorian novels considered in this study all deal with this question of what matters, answering it, or not, in various ways in relation to science and religion along with other issues significant for Victorians and for us.

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One thing that matters is telling the truth, which, by binding people together through reliability and trust, represents a commitment to mutual welfare and necessitates bearing witness to its violation. Looking at “the ethical side of trauma,” Christian Gutleben comments, “It is through the restitution or fabrication of historical testimonies of trauma that Swift and his generic kindred restore the prevalence of ethics” (“Shock” 146). As such, Ever After represents an ethical exercise in truth telling about the loss of faith in religion and humanity, but at the same time it tells the story of two men whose relation to truth is problematic. Both Pearce and Unwin try to tell the truth about personal and societal traumas; they share this ethical dimension to their identities. But Pearce’s willingness to devastate his family in the cause of a truth-telling believed more important than love and commitment is morally suspect. And Unwin is both uncertain and self-destructively divided in his attempts to tell the truth as he continually admits ignorance about his own life and about Pearce’s; it is not surprising that he gives up fictionally trying to fill in gaps in historical knowledge in contemplation of writing a scholarly book based on “true” history. His desire to realize an admirable self motivates him to try to tell Pearce’s story accurately and thereby stabilize himself through a clear connection with the past and an accomplishment that will resonate into the future, but his self-distrust and admitted limits of knowledge in trying to construct a saving as well as a true narrative cripple the attempt. He wants Truth, but he also, as David Malcolm puts the matter, “insists on the necessity of the flawed, the partial, the untrustworthy, and the illusionary that is also beautiful and saving” (156). He is hopelessly torn. The novel asks if saving illusions, including religion, are in fact necessary for human happiness, but it suggests that even if they are such, today’s world works to disallow them. For Pearce and Unwin the seeming stability of the nineteenth century manifests in scientific and especially technological accomplishments such as those displayed at the Great Exhibition and in Brunel’s great Saltash bridge that Pearce helps build. In the nineteenth century Darwinism plays out as just one of the socio-scientific enemies of stability. The twentieth century brings more. As a boy Unwin is captivated by the power and drama of steam engines, but their replacement by diesels destroys that romance. The expression of science and technology most damaging to Unwin’s life is the detonation of the atomic bomb.8 It inherently represents disintegration and instability, but it also turns out to be the likely reason for his father’s suicide (204, 205) and thus the disintegration of Unwin’s boyhood. His life becomes the experience of substitutes for what really matters or outright negations of the elusive ideal of authenticity. The effect on Unwin is to push him into self-enclosed suffering for which his love for Ruth had been an anodyne but no cure. His ethical identity involves the wish both factually and fictionally to tell the truth but he ends up unable to establish relations with others through genuine caring, such is his personal devastation in a society without answers. He ends up isolated.

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Daniel Lea states that “[t]he dissipation of faith in established institutions of socio-ethical authority endows the individual with a weighty liberation that demands the negotiation of parameters of conduct through cooperative means. Such an intersubjective dialogue Swift has repeatedly shown to be alien to the individualism of the twentieth-century self.” Furthermore, citing the idea that “Swift is a religious writer who writes areligious fiction,” Lea recognizes that Swift’s “work concentrates around the empty, desiccated lives of those who have lost faith, not necessarily in religion but in the thing that most effectively sustains them” (Graham Swift 158–59). Pearce loses faith in love as the paramount good; Unwin’s compulsive need to reassert its transcendent validity might indicate the same. In the present and in the Victorian past Ever After gloomily depicts the power of modernity, especially as driven by science and technology, to provoke crises of faith in individuals’ self-worth that religion, still on some level a felt human need, is understood to no longer address. Furthermore, unlike most of the novels I deal with, in Swift’s narrative protagonists’ crises of faith do not clearly point the way to more desirable identities. In one of his many allusions to Hamlet, Unwin exclaims, “Alas, poor ichthyosaur” (155), conflating biological extinction with the disillusioning potential of scientific discovery, with his and Pearce’s lost innocence, and with that of Hamlet as he holds the skull of his childhood friend.

VI The Bone Hunter, by Tom Holland, takes the story of fossils into the post-Origin era and to America, where its protagonist, like Bill Unwin, seeks in vestiges of the past meaning in the present. Set in the late 1870s, Holland’s novel builds its neo-Victorian mixture of fact and fiction upon the famous “Bone Wars” between professors Othniel Charles Marsh (1831–99) and Edward Drinker Cope (1840–97). In the American West these ferocious and sometimes unscrupulous rivals, supported in their competition by agents, laborers, and government allies, discovered the remains, sometimes whole fossilized skeletons, of scores of extinct and previously unknown species including dinosaurs more massive than anyone had imagined. They had their fi nds transported back east for private collections and museum displays, and they fought intense publication battles, which spilled into the popular press, over matters of scientific interpretation and priority. Combining these and other actual historical figures with fictional characters who become enmeshed in Cope and Marsh’s rivalry, the novel interweaves historical interests and trends. These include not only Victorian science, but unrestrained capitalism, monopolistic concentration of wealth and power, land grabs, Gilded Age opulence, Irish immigrants, poverty, crime, local and federal corruption rings, ecological destruction, and the exploitation of Native Americans.

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Earth history and its human significance, however, occupy the novel’s thematic center upon which nineteenth-century paleontology, geology, evolutionary theory, and ethnology converge. It also focuses the novel’s generic heterogeneity consisting of adventure, crime, mystery, romantic love, and philosophical speculation. The Bone Hunter is historically replete with ideas and issues. These include, once more, the intersection of nineteenth-century science and religion, and again Lyme Regis sets the stage. William Paley Dawkins—generally called the Captain because of his one-time career in the British army—recalls that as a boy on vacation with his family at Lyme Regis he saw a “pterosaur [being] chiselled” from a cliff ” and afterward lay awake and “tried to make some sense of the earth’s vast age, revealed to him now in all its blind and unheeding immensity. The next day . . . he found a black-whorled ammonite” and felt that it “might indeed seem redeemed from the dizzying impermanence of things” (259). Nevertheless he was affl icted by a terrifying sense of disorder, of catastrophism fueled by his father’s vision of the biblical flood: “Landscapes of convulsion” where “[m]ountains were shivered, continents engulfed, ammonites left to grow extinct on desert sands” (335). But at school his exposure to Lyellian gradualism comforted him with a sense of natural order, as did his later work with a geology professor who, famous for “the dating of strata,” hoped on that basis “to establish a universal chronology” (336, 337). The Captain’s boyhood experiences ignite in him a lifelong passion to find meaning, order, and a sense of permanence in collecting and studying fossilized traces of ancient life. This turn to science, however, separated him from the faith of his father, a vicar who in nature found evidence of God’s design and goodness—explanation for the son’s fi rst and middle names: William Paley. The Captain recalls an occasion when his father and “fellow clerics” were voted off the board of a natural history society the Vicar had founded, displaced by “young men, bright and contemptuous with new thinking” and “talk . . . of Lyell and Darwin, of . . . the inconceivable gradations of time, and of the savagery of the war fought out by living things” (191). These young men represent the thinking of the new breed of professional scientists of whom Thomas Huxley was the militant ringleader. Dawkins also remembers when, causing the Vicar to moan in distress, he turns the Bible against his father: “What do you read there, a rare truth among its manifest errors? ‘Speak to the earth, and it will teach thee—Job’” (192). By this time the Captain seems imbued with the Higher Criticism as well as geological knowledge. But he remains in doubt: throughout the novel his insecure materialism bumps up against uncomfortable atheism in confusion over the meaning of nature, and ultimately he has to live with uncertainty and a world in which meaning lies only in choice and commitment and an abiding sense of wonder at that which will never be fully comprehended.

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In America he again cites the Bible in attempting to wrest permanence from transience, life from death, by referring to “Ezekiel, who stood in the valley of dry bones, and watched them brought back to life.” But he is speaking to Professor Cope, a devout Quaker who, religiously extrapolating on the other’s paleontological point, replies, “Aye, sir, so he did. For to the Lord there is nothing impossible. Nor either to he who can keep hold of his faith” (138). The tension between materialist and theologically-tinged approaches to science was played out in the battle between the historical Marsh, a Darwinist, and Cope, a neo-Lamarckian who believed evolution is driven by teleological vitalism realized through the drives of individual organisms. This notion allowed some of its adherents to hold onto God as the force behind evolution and the end point toward which it is directed; it is similar to Richard Owen’s position described in the last chapter. Holland fictionally picks up on the tension between these two intellectual and emotional dispositions by using Cope as the voice of religion-based science. He “denied . . . Darwin’s teaching, preferring the long-superseded theories of Lamarck”; “argued for the superfluity of natural selection”; and discerned “in the record of the past the shaping hand of God” (130). But the novel also calls into question his religious sincerity because of his obsessive competition with Marsh. Competition—economic, political, and ethnic—is a major theme. The Bone Hunter repeatedly references the survival of the fittest ethos of Social Darwinism, for whom several characters serve as mouthpieces and in whose light readers are invited to view the whole Marsh-Cope affair; through his own ambition to achieve fame the Captain becomes caught up in it. If there are hints of Social Darwinism in Darwin’s own writing, they are relatively few and indirect, but some readers found in the Origin, with its “war of nature,” justification for exercising power over the less powerful. This is, as Thomas Huxley forcefully argues in Evolution and Ethics, a fallacious and dangerous translation of the workings of nature into the realms of culture and ethics. In the novel a great industrialist and capitalist—reminiscent of Andrew Carnegie, who is said to have been delighted when he found in Darwinism justification for economic predation—ridicules the idea that there is “mystery in the orderings of nature, [for] there was in truth no mystery, but only the universal patterning of savagery and greed.” “The destiny of a lower life form can only be extinction,” he says (472, 487). Another character articulates the view that “the weak will ever be devoured by the needs of the strong. You see that clearer out in the West, things being simpler there, redskins, white skins, it’s all the same, there’s no one doesn’t want to prey on someone else” (78). A land speculator informs Cope that “[t]he first rule of life is selfpreservation” and that fools fail to see that this principle nourishes “the great tree of life,” which is the metaphor Darwin develops in Chapter 4 of the Origin to explain the character of biological nature, including extinctions. The Professor responds, “There is One Who is a better guide to Creation than Mr Darwin . . . for He is the One to Whose hand all of Creation bears witness” (369). At no point does Holland’s novel dismiss or make fun of religious views

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such as Cope’s, but it does critique ideologies supporting the go-go mindlessness of American expansionism as well as, obliquely, the British imperialism in which the Captain once participated. The novel demonstrates that science too, through scientists’ drive for knowledge, power, and fame, also can produce a form of imperialism; this is an important theme in English Passengers and The Voyage of the Narwhal, the subjects of the next chapter. For the Captain things are not simple. He sees design in nature and natural science, in taxonomy and the identification of geological strata for instance, but he is all too aware that science also speaks of chaos and uncertainty. He is torn, and his surname, taken in contrast to the implications of his fi rst and middle names, perhaps expresses this condition. I suspect Holland had in mind evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the best known and most strident of the “new atheists” who in recent years have attacked religion, upheld science as the true way of knowing, and disallowed any meeting ground between the two. The novel in general, like Captain Dawkins, is not satisfied with atheistic science, though neither does it endorse religion. What it does is to comprehend both science and religion as vastly important historical and psychological forces. On the anti-materialist side of the ledger it places not only the Bible but Transcendentalism and Native American spirituality. In translation an Indian elder says that “all of life is but a fevered dream . . . and it is we who are in the shadows, for this world is the image of a world of spirits, which reaches to the stars, and back to the start of time. Death is but the portal that leads us to this world.” He also says, in a message readers can apply to scientific progress, “The world of things is broader than we can ever know, and our understanding of it is like the scratching on a bank of dust, made by a man lost on a limitless plain” (171, 171–72). This is reminiscent of Newton’s oft-quoted statement that as a scientist he was “a boy playing on the sea-shore . . . whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Transcendentalism enters the novel through Thoreau, who was greatly interested in Indians and their spirituality. On several occasions he is referred to or quoted. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” also is quoted along Transcendentalist lines: “‘And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue, And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels’” (86). Of the Indians it is said that “the landscape of their home is sacred, and all the living creatures it contains, and every blade of grass” (236). The second half of the novel takes place in the West, and there the Captain, when not preoccupied, senses the miraculous and sacred. In nature he sees much to wonder at; he is “a man for whom wonder was a precious thing” (66). One source of wonder increasingly is Lily, the young woman he comes to love, and at the end of the novel, after hundreds of pages of obstructions and missed signals, and after a series of life-and-death adventures, they wordlessly recognize their mutual love. This is after a bloody escape from outlaws involved in a wide-ranging scheme, under the guise of fossil collecting, for siphoning off government money meant for Indian reservations

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and after Cope and Marsh achieve a precarious, momentary reconciliation. This occurs after the novel’s intricate skein of mysteries is unraveled. But there is no unalloyed happy ending: Captain Dawkins has seen too much darkness, too much violence and destruction in nature and in the world of men. For example, he has encountered the disappearance of the bison and with them the death of the Indian way of life. So for the Captain, like the speaker in “Dover Beach” and similar to Matthew Pearce in Ever After, neither romantic love nor hope in the future can fully withstand a Godless universe of vacated meaning. From the fi rst he had imagined that behind or within mystery lay, not God, but nevertheless some universal pattern of purpose or moral intent. But now “[h]e knew that destiny was nothing but a word which men used to disguise from themselves the nature of a world without analogue or end. . . . The waters might move to the motion of a pattern, but it was a pattern which would not tolerate hope of any mystery. . . . The Captain doubted his own joy (506). Thus the novel ends on a mixed note, with romantic love qualified by awareness of past darkness and future uncertainty. It admits that full meaning, that access to Truth, is unachievable—that there is no “mystery” of divine or ultimate meaning to be solved. The Captain and Lily realize that even the tale of how they fi nally unite will become “just the pattern of a tale. For the tale was [to be] fashioned from what otherwise would have been without any ordering at all” (503–04). It is what neo-Victorian novels concerned with science and religion do in ordering history and making it signify through the tales of men and women. In the end meaning is what humans create out of the raw and wayward stuff of life. In the last sentences of The Bone Hunter, from “an outcrop of rock which rose crumbling like the ruin of a tower, millennia old,” the Captain and Lily “looked out over the country. . . . And it seemed that across the plains there were buffalo moving, and they too were measureless, nor ever ceased flowing” (516). But the vast herds of buffalo are gone and it is unlikely, though not impossible, they will ever return. Certainly civilization and humanity itself will someday, like the ruin of a tower, pass away. But the measureless potential of the present remains. So this is a vision of past, present, and future, and of doubt and hope mixed, as well as of a world where neither science nor religion nor anything else has all the answers. But none of that makes time and space and the human condition less fascinating in a world where all is a fathomless and endless flow. Part of this fascination is that the Captain and Lily have come together, against great odds, and are inexplicably, almost mystically, sharing the same vision. Wonder remains, as it does in almost all of the novels covered in this book, most of which give it fuller expression than the three narratives I have discussed in this chapter. In the next chapter wonderment is associated with natural science done well and with the spirituality of native peoples whose attitudes toward nature and their place in it, under attack by Euro-American power and ways of knowing, are all the more poignantly represented.

4

Paradises Lost The Voyage of the Narwhal and English Passengers

I The bulk of this chapter concerns Mathew Kneale’s English Passengers, published in 2000, but it will begin with Andrea Barrett’s 1998 novel The Voyage of the Narwhal, which anticipates some of the situations and themes in Kneale’s book. Both narratives connect science, religion, and native peoples to the Victorian puzzle of how, in view of biblical tradition and pre-Darwinian science, to comprehend and treat racial differences—an issue important for Victorian anthropology and the cultural biases to which it was subject. Voyage tells the story of Erasmus Darwin Wells, who, after various setbacks and failures as a naturalist on an Arctic voyage of discovery, spent a number of years back home in Philadelphia dispiritedly pursuing his scientific interests and feeling washed up. Then as the novel begins he is given a chance to redeem himself by participating in another Arctic voyage, this one under the command of his cousin, Zeke Voorhees, who turns out to be pathologically driven by the desire for fame. Again Wells is to serve as naturalist, but the Narwhal’s chief mission is to seek evidence of the famous Franklin expedition and its quest for the Northwest Passage. Sir John Franklin (1786–1847), his two ships, and all crew members disappeared in 1845; Barrett’s novel is set in 1855–58. The Narwhal’s journey becomes a harrowing survival tale, and from the point of view of the novel the most significant discovery is not Franklin’s fate but the Eskimos who save the sick and starving explorers. Erasmus Wells’s father, a gentleman naturalist in an age of amateur and gentleman naturalists, named his son after Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), the famous physician, naturalist, and poet. From the time Erasmus Wells was a boy he too “wanted to be a naturalist” (262). During the Narwhal voyage Wells and the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Boerhaave, study flora, fauna, and landforms and occupy themselves by making drawings, collecting samples, and taking notes. Strangers at the beginning of the trip, the two men form a friendship—an important development for the previously self-isolated Wells—and share their thoughts. One subject of conversation is the issue, explored in a number of neo-Victorian novels,

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of whether or not nature, and hence natural science, discloses evidence of God’s design. “Nature,” Boerhaave believes, “is not random but is the product of thought, planning, and intelligence. The entire history of creation has been wisely ordained” with man as its goal: “[T]he earth and stars and the planets . . . had all condensed from swirling clouds of gas. . . . [that] developed constantly toward man” via a succession of life forms. Each species, he states, “is a thought in the mind of God,” who created the earth, not only “in six days” but also in “subsequent, successive creations after catastrophes similar to the biblical flood” (157, 158). Boerhaave’s idea of cosmic development directed toward humans, though not his catastrophism, is reminiscent of Robert Chambers’s Vestiges, published in 1844. The doctor’s protest against randomness, which carries a post-Darwinian flavor though the novel is set in the 1850s, might reflect Lyell’s Principles in which earth processes remain, in the long run, steady and stable. Reading Lyell and possibly Chambers also could have contributed to Boerhaave’s belief in an ancient earth, to which Erasmus Wells also subscribes (346). The doctor’s thinking also echoes the transcendental anatomy championed by Richard Owen. In Boerhaave’s conception, “[l]arge groups of plants and animals share a common morphology, a unity of plan. . . . Individual species may disappear, but the blueprints persist, with variations; variant forms of the Form” (355; emphasis original). Geology and paleontology, which had made a literal reading of Genesis difficult for anyone with serious scientific aspirations, encouraged recourse to either the doctrine of continual special creations or the idea that from the fi rst God had mandated the periodic appearance of new species by means of secondary laws. In his thinking Boerhaave is said to have been influenced by his “good friend” Harvard professor Louis Agassiz (1807–73), famed geologist, paleontologist, and glaciologist (283, 157). The referencing of Agassiz might be connected to the enormous power of ice, which the narrative dramatizes on a number of occasions, because he was the fi rst to understand that many earth features had been sculpted by glaciers, one of which the expedition members explore (77–80). But Agassiz is even more relevant to Barrett’s handling of race and of Eskimos, for the professor was an advocate of polygenesis—the theory, discussed in Chapter 2, that human races constitute separate species with separate origins. In holding this position, Agassiz, though a fierce opponent on primarily religious grounds of pre-Darwinian and later of Darwinian evolution, had already moved away from the Genesis account in the sort of compromise many geologists had made in trying to fit science to religious dogma. In the novel a religiously inclined critic protests Agassiz’s belief that “human races are different species, descended from different Adams who were created separately in different zoological regions—this is to argue that scripture is allegorical rather than literal” (272). Another character fi nds Agassiz’s view objectionable “because of the ammunition it gives to the proponents of slavery” and because he wanted to use “Dr. Morton’s collection of skulls” to advance his theory (272). This

Paradises Lost 81 reference is to Samuel George Morton (1799–51), American physician and naturalist, who was widely influential in arguing not only that races are different species but, based on his measurements of crania, that they possess different brain sizes reflecting different mental capacities; he found Whites the most intelligent and Blacks the least so. Wells characterizes Morton’s vast collection of skulls from around the world as indicative of “an awful obsession” (273). According to the novel, a lack in Morton’s permanent collection is Eskimo skulls (381). As the novel develops, so too does its focus on the Eskimos encountered by the Arctic adventurers. The novel notes aspects of Eskimo culture that seem sophisticated responses to their environment, while various characters, as well as some of the nineteenth-century epigraphs with which Barrett begins her chapters, characterize Eskimos as inherently primitive and barbarous. Wells, “a trained observer” of natural phenomena (38) but initially lacking in fellow feeling, records aspects of Eskimos’ beliefs and behaviors and comes to appreciate them. Then back in Philadelphia he watches with distress the fate of two Eskimos, a mother and son renamed Annie and Tom, whom Commander Voorhees had manipulated into returning with him to the United States as evidence of his exploits. This episode mirrors historical instances in which indigenous people were brought to Europe and displayed; such is the experience of Martin Frobisher’s captive Inuit whose death Penelope Lively, in one of her novel’s flashbacks into London history, briefly fictionalizes in City of the Mind (182–84). Separated from all they had known and loved, the two Eskimos encounter a world they cannot comprehend along with lack of concern about their welfare. Their Arctic home and close-knit society appear like a lost paradise and this new place, with its masses of strangers seemingly strange even to one another, quite the opposite. Mary becomes mortally ill after Voorhees takes her and her son on a money-making tour during which the two must theatrically enact, dressed in Eskimo garb, the use of native weapons and other artifacts. The novel shares Mary’s mythically informed visions as her consciousness withdraws from her body and enters a spirit world invested with qualities of her homeland; the episode is similar to that in Lively’s novel, where the captive Inuit “sings, and celebrates the land, and thus . . . becomes a part of it once more” (184). Upon Mary’s death Voorhees, who earlier had disturbed Eskimo graves, gives her body to the newly established Smithsonian Institution where her skeleton is put on display. Wells remembers that a Fijian chieftain brought back on his earlier voyage had suffered a similar fate (351–52); English Passengers includes a similar episode. The severing of bones from flesh suggests that of science from ethics, a violation of the principles of interconnectedness and common good that underlie most religions. Apart from the influence of Genesis on scientific thought, Judeo-Christian religion enters the novel through “a Moravian Missionary” named Johann Schwartzberg who had lived among Eskimos in both Labrador and

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Greenland before being engaged as translator for the Narwhal expedition (58–59). He greatly respects the Eskimos—their characters, customs, and even their religion—and becomes sickened by Voorhees’s obsessive exploitation of them along with everybody else in his pursuit of glory. Through Schwartzberg Christianity receives indirect, qualified endorsement as a constructive force when it lives up to its ideals. But it is Eskimo religion that secures the novel’s esteem because of what is represented as its profound awareness of the interconnections between humans, animals, and environments—which is, as we have seen, one implication of Darwinism. Nature is a realm of mystery and wonderment, and Barrett’s representation of Eskimo religion expresses such. In doing so, as with most of the neoVictorian novels involved with the natural sciences, Voyage of the Narwhal taps into nineteenth-century romanticism and present-day environmentalism. Likewise it pays respect to those who, historically branded as racial others, understand the natural world as a part of themselves. Also typical of such texts, as it is of most neo-Victorian novels, is recognition of gender inequality, which Barrett’s novel treats through an intelligent young woman named Alexandra who serves as housekeeper and companion for Erasmus’s sister during his absence. Her journal entries disclose, among other things, her ambition also to travel and experience heroic adventure in little-known parts of the world; her name is suggestive in that regard. These opportunities are denied her because of economic necessity but especially because of being female. Her situation is similar to that of Mary Anning. A skilled engraver, Alexandra helps Wells upon his return to produce a book about his observations during the voyage. They also fall in love, the penultimate stage of Wells’s emotional rehabilitation to which Dr. Boerhaave and the Eskimos unknowingly have already contributed. Erasmus and Alexandra abduct Tom from Voorhees, fi nd berths on a ship bound for the Arctic, and return the boy to his people. The liberation of Tom, female liberation, and the freeing of Wells from self-concern and selfdoubt coincide. Thus characterized, the end of the novel sounds tidy, but like many neo-Victorian novels, Voyage evinces a postmodern quality that suggests a counter tale: that the real world is not an entirely orderly place and that any version of history, or any narrative, achieves unity and coherence only by imposing it on what inherently is fully neither. The epigraph of the novel quotes the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who states, after asserting his hatred of books about “travelling and explorers,” that our “proliferating and overexcited civilization” has corrupted peoples and places “by a busyness with dubious implications, which . . . dooms us to acquire only contaminated memories” (Holland 11). At several points in the novel Erasmus Wells worries about telling the truth in writing out his observations and experiences. Who can tell the whole truth or not contaminate it with his or her impositions, meanings perhaps all the more imposing when imprinted by modernity?

Paradises Lost 83 At the end of the novel the uncertainties of truth-telling mix with the artistic desire for coherence and closure. Using the bones of disparate animals wrapped in skin, Tom fashions a kind of fetish, a “tupilaq,” which when put in the ocean, the boy believes, will seek out Zeke Voorhees: at some future time when the man is in the water, it will brush up against him, he will open it up, and then he will die. He will have encountered a monstrous image of his own internal monstrosity, something unnatural, incoherent, and ultimately self-destructive. Earlier, after he has stayed with them for a while, the Eskimos describe Voorhees as “a sixth fi nger”—someone who has no organic function in their society or any society because of a selfhood that, we are to understand, expresses modern over-insistence on individual autonomy and ambition. The tupilaq is called “the nightmare skeleton” (369), and it captures the nightmare of the stripping and display of Annie’s skeleton and the “scientifically” inhuman mindset that allowed it. In the fi nal chapter, back in the Arctic, the shaman, or “angekok,” of Tom and his mother’s band refuses to blame Wells for what happened to Annie’s body, and the absolved Erasmus notices that the angekok calls Annie his band’s “sister” (393). The point is that everyone in this group of Eskimos is considered brother and sister, and Wells himself is no longer a stranger, a man apart. Then the novelist briefly interjects a strange episode conveying uncertainty: some years later, when Voorhees is fording a river full of bodies during the Civil War—as civil society or “civilization” is destroying itself over whether Blacks are human enough to be free—something dark brushes up against Zeke, and to an observer of the scene it seems to merge with the swimmer; maybe a muskrat the man thinks. So is it the tupilaq? Why not? But we are not told what happens to Voorhees. The novel leaves the matter undecided, a reminder of the epistemological conundrum that fiction exists only in relation to a reality that humans can never entirely disconnect from their fictions. In the novel’s fi nal sentence Erasmus and Alexandra watch as “Tom,” a name Wells has come to recognize has nothing to do with the boy, puts the tupilaq in the water. And yet like any novel worth reading, whatever its modernist or postmodernist ambitions, The Voyage of the Narwhal tips the balance in favor of order and determinacy, even if it is asserted only as potential. I have claimed that this tendency is particularly evident in neo-Victorian novels concerned with science and religion—especially science that celebrates the wonder of nature and religion stripped of the dogma that precludes that response. Alexandra looks at an arctic flower: “The stems, the texture of the rock, the ice, the sky, the streaming clouds—they looked one way to Erasmus, another way to her. Also—also, she thought, it was everything—they were themselves” (392; emphases original). Here individuality and unity co-exist in Erasmus, in herself, in nature, and all of it is honored. It exists not just in the external world; it is also the product of her creative vision. This is a neo-romantic natural order, a reality beyond

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logic that completes both Erasmus’s and Alexandra’s stories in which they were searching, without being much aware of it, for self-fulfi llment through love of what culture has left unpolluted by the unprincipled exercise of power. It is consistent with what the novel imagines about Eskimos. Matthew’s Kneale’s English Passengers adopts a similar attitude toward Tasmanian Aborigines.

II The far-ranging tale told in Matthew’s Kneale’s English Passengers, Booker Prize finalist and Whitbread Book of the Year for 2000, is architecturally ambitious, covering nearly forty years in considerable detail and employing twenty different narrators and reporters. Nevertheless, it hangs together as a tightly constructed historical novel that, different from Ever After, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and several other novels treated in this book, situates itself in the nineteenth century without the additional perspective or complexities provided by a substantive twentieth-century narrator or narrative voice. Clarity is further helped by focusing on five main narrators, their multiple installments interspersed throughout the novel: Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley, the Manx skipper of the Sincerity, a ship designed for smuggling but forced to undertake a voyage from England to Tasmania; the Reverend Geoffrey Wilson, an Anglican priest who, believing himself divinely inspired, hires Kewley’s ship to take him and his expeditionary party to discover the site of Eden, which he believes lies somewhere in Tasmania’s interior; the equally obsessive Dr. Thomas Potter, determined to find evidence among native Tasmanians for his pseudoscientific racist theories; Timothy Renshaw, a dissolute young man whose parents enlist him as the expedition’s botanist in order to rid themselves of his troublesome presence; and finally Peevay, raised among the Tasmanian Aborigines as the biracial result of an Englishman’s rape of his mother. The novel begins in 1857 with the events leading up to the expedition, drops back to 1820 and the circumstances of Peevay’s conception, and then bounces back and forth between the two time frames, gradually bringing the earlier one—about the growth of the British colony and the tragic fate of its native inhabitants—up to the culminating events of 1858, after the Sincerity reaches Tasmania. Taking the form of the multi-narrator novels pioneered by Wilkie Collins in The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868)—developments of the earlier epistolary tradition—English Passengers offers a broad range of perspectives showing how complex historical events interact with the different backgrounds, dispositions, and belief systems of individuals. Distinct from a novel like Ark Baby with its farfetched, postmodern playfulness, though also able to combine humor with dark occurrences, Passengers despite some broad satire largely adheres to a realistic mode that promotes the illusion of being a Victorian product. This illusion is

Paradises Lost 85 supported by the documentary force of fictional letters, journal entries, a newspaper article, and excerpts from books—a heterogeneous assemblage of sources that looks back to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Yet while this neo-Victorian adaptation of a late nineteenth-century literary form promotes a type of realism, the novel’s fictionality appears in the unlikelihood that all of its many fi rst-person story tellers, most of them unknown to the others, would have recorded tightly interlocking, chronological segments—nearly ninety of them in all—that somehow got joined together. This super-abundance of narrators, far beyond anything found in Victorian novels and still unusual today, points not only to the novel’s Victorian antecedents but to neo-Victorian genre-bending. The novel’s present-day provenance—marked by aspects that, taken together, set it apart from a novel conceivable in the nineteenth century— comes across particularly in its attitudes toward imperialism, race, class, and gender. But these prevailing categories of contemporary cultural criticism derive fi rst of all from the novel’s involvement with nineteenth-century science, religion, their relationship to one another, and their misuse as evidenced especially in the beliefs and actions of Reverend Wilson and Dr. Potter—characters who, along with Renshaw, comprise the main “English Passengers” of the title. Although members of the same expedition, Wilson and Potter quickly come to despise one another, mostly because they are egotists fi red by different obsessions. Through severely strained logic and belief in providential promptings, Wilson, self-trained in geology, believes that the rocks of the Tasmanian Eden will support biblical evidence that the earth is only six thousand years old rather than the many thousands, or even millions, that scientists increasingly had been positing since the beginning of the century. A non-believer, Potter considers the other’s idea nonsense but signs on to Wilson’s expedition for the opportunity to study human groups whose appearance and behavior he believes will disclose their various degrees of physical, mental, and moral inferiority to his own. Yet the two enthusiasts resemble one another in their misuse of science since each bases his theories upon faulty premises, selective observations, and spurious interpretations. Although convinced of their involvement in scientific research, both in fact are subject to forms of fundamentalist thinking founded on faith either that God’s intentions are discernible to the spiritually privileged individual or that a superior observer can discern the essences of racial groups. The two men also, without any clear awareness of the matter, are agents of British imperialism. Michael Ross points out that Potter’s “scientific scheme, like Wilson’s religious one, is meant as a theoretical prop for the grand narrative of Britain’s empire” expressing its sense of historical destiny (257). Wilson and Potter are victims of ideology in a pejorative sense: a structure of rigidly maintained beliefs, at variance with disinterested interpretations of experience, meant to maintain or enhance the power of the person

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or group that holds them.1 In this sense ideologies determine the destructive actions of the two antagonists and of wider social forces, especially those of British colonialism and the explicit and implicit racism that helps support it. Finding less to admire about Victorians than do the general run of neoVictorian novels, English Passengers also critiques, often satirically, negative traits frequently ascribed to the Victorian era or the Victorian middle class, including excessive earnestness, workaholism, obsession with social distinctions, prudery, paternalistic attitudes toward women, and belief in its cultural superiority. Most centrally, Kneale’s novel indicates how Victorian ideological investments contribute to the subversion of the dominant or professed values of both religion and science and, through them, of society in general.

III The fi rst page of English Passengers presents itself as a facsimile title page of a pamphlet authored by “The Reverend Geoffrey Wilson, M.A. Cantab.” and published by “J. P. Terence 52 Paternoster Square London 1856.” Running down the page, its various phrases dramatized in different styles and sizes of print, the title in part reads, “A Proof against the Atheisms of Geology: The Truth of the Chronology of the Bible Conclusively Shown with a New and Important Revelation That the Garden of Eden Was Not, As Supposed, Located in the Region of Arabia, But Was Instead in Australia, on the Island of Tasmania . . . Including a Full and Extended Explanation of the Theory of Divine Refrigeration.” The nineteenth century, especially its fi rst half, witnessed many pamphlets and other publications about the relationship of geology and religion that attempted either to uphold one against the other or to reconcile the two, and they often bore, like many other non-fiction works, long tendentious titles. The detailed verisimilitude of the title page might seem undercut by the odd, humorous-sounding notion of “Divine Refrigeration,” but the phrase as part of a title probably would have sounded less peculiar to the average Victorian reader, habituated to pamphlets arguing about all sorts of controversies and to flights of eccentric speculation presented as fact. In light of the bizarre details of Wilson’s personality and theory encountered early in the novel, the title page seems forthrightly comical. Later the theory loses some of its humor, since it not only produces negative consequences but reflects the decoupling of will and ethics that characterizes—through combinations of economic, political, legal, and military means—the victimization of those perceived to stand in the way of progress. Wilson’s involvement with geology begins when as a priest in Yorkshire he starts collecting rocks as a pastime—neither his marriage nor his vocation seem particularly satisfying—but it is unclear that his understanding of science ever advances much beyond the ability to identity types of rocks,

Paradises Lost 87 even though he comes to consider himself a geologist at a time when geology was often the province of gentleman practitioners and, like other branches of the natural sciences, of Anglican clergymen. Wilson fi rst encounters the science of geology in a book he purchases on the subject, and upon beginning to read it he “received a mighty shock. Even in the very fi rst chapter the author—supposedly a geologist of repute—brazenly asserted that Silurian limestone was no less than one hundred thousand years of age. This despite the fact that the Bible tells, and with great clarity, that the earth was created a mere six thousand years ago.” From that point on Wilson’s goal is not understanding geology per se but rather disproving the conclusions of a growing majority of geologists, for the idea of an ancient earth “was not mere error, this was slander. This was a most poisonous assault upon the good name of the Scriptures” (20). His discovery of scriptural challenge fuels Wilson with a sense purpose he had hitherto lacked, for now he can see that during his long and trying career as a humble parish priest he “was simply being prepared for the great task now revealed to me: to right this terrible wrong, and prevent weak minds from being led astray by this vile falsehood” (20). His divinely inspired mission, confi rmed by a lucid dream he takes as providential, causes him to author three debunking pamphlets, the second and third answering weaknesses in his theory identified by readers. First of all Wilson feels compelled to answer the claim that the earth, once in a molten state, could not have cooled enough in six thousand years to explain its current temperate condition. In his fi rst pamphlet his “reply was that the earth had indeed cooled at great speed, being made possible by a process I termed Divine Refrigeration. Seeing as our Lord had enjoyed the power to create the world, it seemed only logical, after all, that he would also have had the power to alter its temperature” (31). He seemingly does not bother with other arguments in support of an ancient earth except for his simplistic dismissal of fossils. Here he focuses on the remains of trilobites, which rivaled those of ichthyosaurs in offering to the early nineteenth century compelling evidence of fossilization and extinction. Ubiquity rather than size made trilobites fodder for geological controversy, but it is its generally modest appearance, inconsistent with the grandiosity of Wilson’s mission and the self-importance that informs it, that causes him to dismiss “the atheist geologists’ second claim, which concerned the vanished creatures. My adversaries had fussed greatly about these, especially a defunct animal named the trilobite—that resembles nothing so much a giant wood louse . . . and which they claimed must have existed in some long-past era.” Wilson discounts the fossil record, with its evidence of origins and extinctions throughout many ages, by arguing that there once must have been many creatures worthless to humans, some of them “simply ludicrous, such as this tiresome specimen. Naturally, with time, many of the less satisfactory animals—and what could be less satisfactory than a giant wood louse?—simply vanished away.” If, as criteria for survival

88 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels fitness, usefulness and attractiveness to humans are seen to replace natural selection, then Wilson’s anthropocentric idea somewhat resembles Darwin’s regarding the extinction of the poorly adapted; published a few years after the appearance of Wilson’s fictional pamphlets, the Origin would have presented the clergyman with a much greater challenge. As it is, in his fi rst pamphlet Wilson perfects his theory of survival and extinction by proposing that many inferior creatures such as trilobites “would have succumbed during the great flood” (21), echoing the old notion that creatures not mentioned in the Bible became extinct when they missed or were excluded from the Ark. Fossil evidence of extinct species raised a number of problems for eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century biblical literalists who supported a recent creation but felt the need to take account of geology. Where these species came from and how they died out were two of the easier challenges to dismiss via creative and untestable hypotheses. More challenging difficulties included how fossilization could happen in a short time and why fossils are sometimes found on the top of mountains, but creationists also accounted for these in various ways, including imagined effects of the Great Flood. The author has Wilson, despite his supposed in-depth study of geology (20), ignore not only these issues involving fossils but also the major areas of support for an ancient earth that already had been advocated in the eighteenth century or earlier. These included studies about rates of sedimentation and of erosion as well as evidence that the surface of the earth had been shaped on multiple occasions by volcanic forces and by interchanges of land and sea. What Wilson surprisingly directs his counterattack against, however, is the argument for a long earth history based upon the cooling of the earth. This, however, was not a widely held position until 1862 when the physicist William Thompson, later Lord Kelvin, published his conclusion that the earth was ninety-eight million years old. He based his calculation on evidence that the earth had begun in a molten state—a concept by his day almost universally shared by geologists—and on the rate at which the earth, given its presumed mass and composition, could be expected to lose heat until it reached its current temperature. Scientific support for an ancient earth was not entirely new. For example, some investigators had adopted that position based on calculations about the rate at which the ocean was becoming salinized or at which its water level was thought to be dropping from a distant time when it covered the entire earth. Prior to Thompson, the most notable proponent of a cooling earth as evidence of its age was the Comte du Buffon (1707–1788). Based on his testing of heat loss by various solid objects, he estimated the age of the earth at around seventy-five thousand years, and later he speculated that it was far older. 2 Although Buffon was a famous and widely respected naturalist, his thinking about the great age of the earth did not have much impact, and the same was the case for the estimate by William Herschel (1738–1822) of

Paradises Lost 89 the earth’s enormous antiquity, a conclusion that was generally overlooked despite his fame as an astronomer.3 Nevertheless, Reverend Wilson’s preoccupation with heat loss or “refrigeration” is not entirely implausible, especially given that this largely comic two-dimensional character is presented from the fi rst as vastly eccentric. I suspect, however, that Kneale gives Wilson his life-changing fi xed idea primarily as a way of getting him to Tasmania and of establishing a connection between bad science and imperialism. In any event, what seems most historically accurate about the treatment of Wilson in the early part of the novel is his involvement in the pamphlet wars that had been raging for decades concerning many controversies, including those centering on geology and religion. Wilson’s second pamphlet responds to an objection arising from his fi rst. One of Wilson’s critics notes that since “Genesis states that these [life forms] were placed upon the earth within two days of the earth having been formed. . . . even divine refrigeration could not cool a world of molten rocks so quickly.” It was at this point, Wilson says, that “the Garden of Eden was brought into the fray” (21). He hypothesizes that “Eden had lain upon a unique form of rock, one that was wholly impervious to heat, and which floated upon the rest like a great raft.” Since Adam and Eve quite likely “lived to great age” like other early Genesis characters, the rest of the world had a chance to cool before God banished the pair for their transgression, at which time plants and animals began spreading beyond Paradise to a now receptive earth (22). This theory, however, merely led to another objection: where is evidence for the existence of this special “form of rock”? It is in answer to this that Wilson produces his masterwork, Proof against the Atheisms of Geology. He had been informed by a letter from a Tasmanian settler who had read one of his pamphlets that the interior of the island contains unexplored mountains that viewed from afar “were like ruined fortresses, almost as if they were all that remained of some wondrous city, built upon a scale greater than could be aspired to by mere man, that had lain forgotten for thousands of years” (22–23). This piece of intelligence is enough to allow Wilson, through strained readings of Genesis concerning the four rivers said to flow out of Eden, to connect it with four rivers known to arise somewhere in the Tasmanian highlands. His argumentative tour de force is his explanation that the Genesis names for the four rivers resemble the Aborigine names for the four Tasmanian rivers as he learns of them from colonial informants. He presents a chart of the four pairs of names, with their similarities, so evident to him, not at all so to readers of the novel. Caroline Lusin believes that through Wilson’s “mistranslation” of the rivers’ names Kneale indicates the “problem of referentiality [that] is crucial to the whole novel” and “parodies scientific discourse, creating awareness for the relativity of normative standards and the precarious character of language.” But then she later allows that “Kneale . . . does not deny the possibility of at least approaching some kind of truth through narrative,

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but questions the reliability of any single narrative” in a novel with twenty narrators (82, 83). The questioning of “referentiality,” which I do not believe is crucial to the novel, constitutes a standard postmodern operation, but English Passengers, like most of the other novels I discuss, is conservative in its belief in the possibility of telling, if not the whole truth, much of it. It is clearly the case that some of Kneale’s narrators are more reliable than others. Wilson’s narrative, for example, certainly is not to be trusted. His narratives are patently self-serving, and his ideas are a grab bag of fallacies and violations of scientific thinking. They are not, however, much sillier than many pseudoscientific theories advanced in the nineteenth century whose fallaciousness is easier to detect today. Wilson says that his publication attracts not only detractors but many supporters; these include those asking when he will mount an expedition to Tasmania to validate his ideas and, in particular, a wealthy supporter who agrees to underwrite such a venture. Wilson recounts the forming of the expeditionary party, its provisioning with food and equipment, and the securing of a ship and crew. But unbeknown to him, he is able to commission the Sincerity only because Captain Kewley needs money and escape from the vicinity of England because his smuggling activities have gone awry and he and his crew are at great risk of being captured by British agents and severely punished. This contingency sets up later complications.

IV English Passengers concerns itself more with colonialism, racism, and the destruction of the Tasmanian Aborigines than it does with geology, “atheist” or otherwise, but the subject is foundational both narratively and thematically as suggested by the title page of Wilson’s culminating pamphlet that constitutes a kind of prologue to the novel. Motivated by his intense self-regard and adherence to a narrow moralism lacking concern about the welfare of actual individuals, Wilson’s obsession with his theory is a more focused version of the forces that motivate British expansion at the expense of native peoples. Like Wilson’s plans, British colonialism overall is largely a matter of self-concern mystified by assertions of moral purpose. An instructive moment occurs when Wilson regrets the destruction of the Tasmanian natives, which is nearly complete by the time of his expedition. Concerning his attempt to learn the names of Tasmanian rivers in support of his theory, he reports, “I sought the aboriginal names, their replacements by white settlers being far too recent, though these proved far from easy to obtain, the aborigines having been, most unfortunately, all but extinguished. My interest being whetted, however, I would accept no discouragement but persevered”—and hence Wilson’s correspondence with colonists about the matter. What is unfortunate is not that many thousands

Paradises Lost 91 of individuals had been erased along with their culture, but simply that Aborigines are unavailable as informants. Therefore Wilson’s concern with a far-off portion of the earth originally populated by racial others is akin to that of British political and economic interests generally and to the attitude of those willing to settle Tasmania while countenancing the destruction of native Tasmanians by design or as a matter of course—although, historically, apparently not all settlers were unsympathetic.4 The subject of group thinking and of the mutual distrust or hostility it creates is introduced, in a form milder than racism and genocide, by the relationship of the Manx crew of the Sincerity to the English. The Isle of Man, which to this day largely retains control of its internal affairs, had a long tradition of smuggling until the mid-eighteenth century, before which time, in the words of Captain Kewley, the island “was still free and independent . . . , having yet to be bought by interfering English politicians, and . . . she took it upon herself to have her own free and independent duties on brandy and tobacco and such, meaning she had hardly any at all” (4–5). But as Kewley goes on to suggest, trouble arose because Manx boats and ships would then smuggle cheap European imports into Ireland and Britain, undercutting the price at which such products could be lawfully sold in those locations and avoiding taxes. Thus British authority, with the English the main enforcers, outlawed Manx trade with the continent that could be turned into smuggling revenue. The Manx of Kewley’s day, however, believed that smuggling was still their traditional privilege and pursued it as vigorously as possible. Therefore Kewley had fitted out the Sincerity— the name is highly ironic regarding both its smuggling and the motives of Wilson and Potter—with twin hulls, the space between dedicated to illegal cargo while its hold carried approved goods such as sardines. To throw off English agents, the Captain had decorated the dining cabin with pictures of Victoria and Albert and their many children, and the same room contains busts of the royal pair—underneath which are trapdoors leading to the hidden transport spaces. This appeal to English patriotism is laughingly at odds with the Manx crew’s true feelings about the English, an antipathy that by the end of the novel is intensified by the horrendous behavior of the English passengers. Provoked by a wet English rifle that won’t fi re, Kewley’s disdainfully passes judgment on English industry, empire, and jingoism—with jabs at the bungled Crimean War and at the genteel manly pastimes of English colonials: “Day and night your Englishmen go boasting about how clever they are with their steel and railways and ships that they’re saying the whole world wants to have, and now it turned out their rifles couldn’t even take a little wet. Did they expect everyone to go fighting Russians and hunting tigers only in fi ne sunny weather? Truly, it was a miracle to me how they’d ever managed to conquer half the world like they had” (399). Kewley characterizes the empire, along with other flawed indices of national greatness, as English rather than British; it appears that as a Manxman he feels too much

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connection with the Celtic portions of Britain to include them. He reserves his disgust for the English. Nevertheless, the tone of the normally genial captain, looking back on events after a number of years, is generally wry and amused as he recalls events that apparently often, but not always, struck much the same chords at the time they occurred. When the ship is searched by the crew of an intercepting coastguard cutter, Kewley tells their commander that his favorite among the displayed prints “is the Victoria. Now there’s royalty, is there not?” To this the officer, not having found the contraband and by this point believing in the sincerity of the Sincerity’s captain, makes the ridiculous response that “[t]he way she leans upon the lion is very natural”—a satirical neo-Victorian smirk at the absurdities of Victorian popular art and design (13). All this comes across as mild in comparison to the sad misunderstandings and deadly aggressions between the British and the Aborigines of Tasmania. Later in the novel Kewley stands out as a sympathetic observer and, despite his smuggling, a moral alternative to racism in action. Another prelude to the theme of the native Tasmanians’ extermination involves the circumstances under which Wilson hires the Sincerity, for the ship he originally commissioned is suddenly requisitioned and sent to India to help put down the 1857 Indian Revolt, or “Great Mutiny” from the British perspective, a setback for Wilson’s plans that leads to the necessity of hiring the Sincerity. For Wilson, the “campaigns against the murderous [Indian] rebels” are waged to “defend the rule of civilization,” but that is not as important as his expedition intended “to defend the very rock upon which was built that civilization: the Scriptures themselves” (41). Conflating the metaphorical biblical rock with his geological rock meant to undergird biblical authority, this statement typically ignores the complexities and injustices of history, including those that engendered both the 1857 uprising and the depredations infl icted on the Tasmanian Aborigines. In a London church in which Kewley and his companions take shelter, they hear a fiery preacher proclaim that “[t]hese terrible events in India . . . are nothing other than the fi rst steps upon the road to the battle that shall end all battles,” with the implication that the Indians are on the side of the evil that will culminate in Armageddon (38). Thus religion as well as geology are made to support the mistreatment of others, here indirectly and later on in ways by turn more active and more subtle. As a theme appearing early in novel, skewed religion joins nationalism as another support for excessive allegiance to groups and to the othering of others. Kewley suggests that the Anglican Bishop of Man, an Englishman, has little concern for his religious charges, his reputation being that of “a huff y old scriss always peering down his nose at the world” and unhappy at being “shut away on a small country full of Methodists mumbling some language he couldn’t understand” (7). But the island in fact contains a selection of denominations, and the liberal-minded captain tells that “Manxmen . . . aren’t always so pure as to their Scriptures, and there’s many will

Paradises Lost 93 go to two or three different churches all on the same Sunday, especially if there’s not much else to do. It seems a shame, after all, to keep just to one when your Anglicans have the best singing, Romans come top for smoke and smells and for theatre you couldn’t beat a hellfi re body” (38). But this tolerance highlights the fanaticism of zealots like Wilson and the hellfi re London preacher who denounces “[f]ornicators and drunkards. Breakers of the Holy Scriptures. Papists and followers of Dr. Pusey. The Turks and all worshippers of the infidel Mohammed. The black savage who had never acknowledged the glory of Christ. The Jew, who murdered Christ our Saviour.” All of these will “be swept away by this great judgment, this mighty tide of destruction” (38). Thus the dark-skinned people that represent a major focus of the novel are to be destroyed, swept away by the God-given trajectory of Christian history along with other ungodly groups; the singular noun applied to each population further strips away the individualities and humanity of its members. As for the native Tasmanians, their apocalyptic destruction is nearly complete by the time of the sermon. 5 Potter also anticipates Armageddon, his secular version involving cataclysmic international warfare in which the Saxon “race” will obliterate all lesser ones. The phenomenon of we and they—in the foregoing case, of redeemed and sinner—gets aired out early in the novel in regard to the British and Europeans, but we soon see that this attitude, a universal human tendency, applies to the Aborigines as well. In Peevay’s narrative the original Tasmanians consist of a number of mutually antagonistic groups. Still, Aboriginal culture appears stable and coherent overall until faced with an enemy too powerful to resist. British incursions, including massacres, gradually force the native bands to abandon their small group identities and hostility toward one another, and under great pressure they assume an uneasy identity as fellow victims. Physical attacks on the natives accompany territorial dispossessions as they are restricted to smaller and smaller areas and as they die from disease. The Whites’ policy of containment includes the novel’s reenactment of the Black Line of 1830—the culmination of the so-called Black War against the Aborigines—in which settlers and convicts marched side by side in a line drawn out over a great distance in order to push the most hostile groups into a small area where they would be forced to live. The novel shows the attempt a ridiculous failure in the short term— the net comes up empty, so adept are the Tasmanian natives at negotiating their own landscape—but also that it contributes to the Aborigines’ ultimate capitulation as they realize they must negotiate with the colonists, settle down, and accept geographical constriction—much as it actually occurred according to the historical record. In the novel the story of the native Tasmanians’ fate comes in part from the accounts of various colonists and of government officials in Tasmania, Australia, and England, but the chief source is Peevay, who lives to tell the tale of his people’s demise as he experienced it fi rst as a boy and then as a man. English Passengers, however, is intent on showing that they were

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not passive victims. While still free they poach the settlers’ livestock and mount counterattacks. The main figure of resistance is Peevay’s mother, Walyeric, who as a young woman was captured and repeatedly raped by the seal hunter Jack Harp, who had made a practice of such activities.6 “That rape figures as the novel’s central symbolic act, a ‘fall’ prefiguring the whole traumatic European violation of the aborigines and their way of life” (Ross 255). After escaping and giving birth to Peevay she becomes the undisputed leader of Aboriginal resistance. She is intelligent, charismatic, and unremitting in her hostility toward the White invaders—and toward Peevay as well because of his White father, whom she longs to track down and kill, and because of her son’s appearance that reminds her of his origin: although dark-skinned, Peevay’s hair is blond. Eventually she is captured and with other remnants of native groups sent to Flinders Island where they, including the adolescent Peevay, are subjected to European ways, but she never gives up trying to foment rebellion. In the epilogue to his novel, Kneale tells that Walyeric is based on an actual figure of that name. Indeed, many of characters whose narratives and reports fi ll the novel, along with many of the events that occur, are representations of historical realities. Peevay, however, is fictional, though his fate of being trapped between two cultures reflects that of those native peoples—in Tasmania and around the world—who did not die outright from Euro-American domination. The lynchpin of the novel, Peevay is perfectly placed to record the traditional ways of his people, the behavior of the colonists and later of the Sincerity’s English passengers, and how imperialist attitudes and practices, including missionary zeal, impact the Tasmanian tribes. As the numbers of native Tasmanians dwindle they are sent—again Kneale follows history—fi rst to Flinders Island, then to the Oyster Bay Colony in Australia, and fi nally, now just a handful of survivors, back to Tasmania and a settlement near the capital of Hobart. Generally following policies set in London, some of the officials are sincere in wanting to protect their charges from the aggression of lawless Whites, especially the convicts who had been transported to Tasmania, while others have mixed motives, and there is much incomprehension about and disdain for the traditional Aboriginal ways and beliefs that stand in the way of their Europeanization. Meanwhile, policies of sympathy and protection sap the Aborigines’ culture and destroy their spirit almost as effectively as do naked aggression and the European illnesses that decimate them. For the Aborigines the dynamics of group identity become confused; we see this in both Peevay and his half-brother, who are young enough to be torn between two worlds. For example, the character of Robson, based on the historical figure of George Augustus Robinson, the “official ‘Protector of the Aborigines’” (Susan Barrett 186), leaves Peevay confused about how he is to understand his place in the world, a condition to which he is predisposed since he is of mixed race and, as a young child, on that basis rejected by his mother and some others of his band. Having learned the native language, Robson is

Paradises Lost 95 responsible for gathering up the remaining Tasmanians and setting up a protective colony for them on Flinders Island, which, once accomplished, contributes to their destruction through diseases as Robson attempts to civilize them by destroying their culture. I agree with Wolfgang Funk that although it is “not justified to categorize the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines as genocide, there remains little uncertainty that their disappearance was caused by a paradoxical mixture of neglect and enthusiasm” (63). At one point Robson, his destructive actions fueled by Christian enthusiasm, puzzles the boy by speaking harshly of Whites who want to harm the native Tasmanians “as if they were not his ones at all but grievous foes. . . . and I pondered this must mean he was ours” (219)—while Peevay in some sense temporarily becomes one of theirs. The division in his halfbrother, Tayaleah, renamed George Vandieman, is even more extreme. He is based upon another historical figure, discussed by Kneale in his epilogue (439), who was sent to the mainland to be educated and proved, in the face of vast skepticism, the ability of Aborigines to absorb Western knowledge and proficiencies. In the novel Tayaleah ends up killing himself, unable to cope with the conflictive expectations of his mother and the Whites. Despite such identity confusions, the surviving Aborigines retain as much of their culture as possible, often misleading their handlers about their true feelings and trying to carry on indigenous practices in secret. Their greatest success in resistance comes in response to attempts to convert them to Christianity, to which they sometimes pay lip service while looking upon it as foolishness. After hearing from Robson that God created people, Peevay remarks, “I knew it wasn’t really this fellow God who made us. It was other ones who are secret, like everybody knows. . . . Everybody knew where our real ones were, as they could see them every night shining in the sky” (219). In general, the more ostentatiously religious the British characters seem, the more morally misguided they show themselves to be; the most humane characters, such as Captain Kewley and Timothy Renshaw, hold themselves aloof from religion. The kindly surgeon on Flinders Island, who “was neglectful of his religious devotions, so that some doubted his Christian conviction,” sympathetically holds that the decline of the Aborigines resulted “from the blacks’ lack of resistance to European diseases, and their being restrained in one place when it was in their nature always to be roaming.” This position is discounted in favor of the idea that “[i]f the aborigines had only shown greater reverence for the Scriptures . . . the good Lord would have been moved to protect them from suffering” (242). While attempting to teach the Aborigines about Christianity, their captors also work hard to divest them of their beliefs; for example, “they were required to discard the superstitious health charms they wore about their necks, which contained . . . bones of their dead relatives, and could hardly have been more barbarously removed from Christian ways” (242–43). The bones, however, are a way of tying the living to the dead and helping unite the individual to a greater whole in time and space—to family and to the

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natural world understood as family; this is similar to how Voyage of the Narwhal characterizes Eskimo belief. Such is the gist of the animistic religion that Tartoyen, elder and friend, teaches to Peevay as a young boy: He taught me how to know what weather was coming next, just from the hazy ring around the moon, or from the shape of clouds, and his ways were so clever he hardly ever was wrong. He showed me how to make spears . . . I learned how to follow animals from the marks they made, to know which tree possum climbed by the scratch he left on the bark with his claws. . . . Tartoyen told us stories—secret stories that I will not say even now—about the moon and the sun, and how everyone got made, from men and wallaby to seal and kangaroo rat and so. Also he told who was in those rocks and mountains and stars, and how they went there. Until, by and by, I could hear stories as we walked across the world, and divine how it got so, till I knew world as if he was some family fellow of mine.” (53) The novel discounts Christian proselytizing as misguided at best while endorsing the native religion the missionaries attempt to erase. As a boy Peevay comes to know and love his world as intensely alive and intimately related to himself. As characterized in English Passengers, Aboriginal identity embraces both one’s group and the universe, with no clear distinction between the two. In contrast, the Christianity to which the Aborigines are subjected comes across as aggressive, shallow, and entirely disconnected from the natural world. Late in the novel several characters by turns narrate an important seriocomic episode that enacts these religious differences and, more generally, British incomprehension about Aborigines. After the twelve or so remaining Aborigines are placed in the community at Oyster Bay near Hobart, the wife of the new Tasmanian governor, a man named Denton—another character based on a historical personage—persuades him to invite them to join in a Christmas celebration. The invitees include Peevay and his mother. Unaware of Walyeric’s militant history, Mrs. Denton does know that Peevay, having learned to speak, read, and write English, had been pestering authorities with written requests and complaints, thereby gaining a reputation for being a troublemaking half breed; she wants everything to come off splendidly and regrets having to invite Peevay, whom she dismisses as inauthentic, not one of “the true Aborigines” (302) of the sort she wishes to cultivate. Brought about through a mixture of good intentions, ignorance, and condescension, the guests’ attendance produces outcomes both ludicrous and poignant. Mrs. Denton had decided that, as a special treat for her Aboriginal guests, she would have them photographed, but she is disappointed when they arrive wearing, not the picturesque native regalia she had envisioned, but humble European clothing. Registering the West’s

Paradises Lost 97 obsession with recording, displaying, and celebrating what it destroys, her desire for indigenous garb fits in with her primary ambition, obscured by a self-deluding overlay of philanthropic sentimentalism, to acquire native artifacts as mementoes of her adventures among a doomed race: “I could quite imagine the sitting room of our London house in some future time, its walls displaying spears and throwing sticks, and a crowd of savage figurines hunched upon the mantelpiece, forming a delightful and also most touching reminder of our time spent upon this faraway shore.” Kneale prepares for his satire on egocentric do-gooding through Mrs. Denton’s recollection that as a child she “formed a little association of playmates dedicated to the preservation of fledgling birds that had fallen accidentally from their nests” (303, 301). The phoniness of Mrs. Denton’s motivations meshes with a nativity play, being planned for the party, in which important members of colonial society will play various roles. Here the birth of Jesus ironically clashes with the death of a race brought on, in part, by a wholesale violation of Christian precepts. And because Walyeric has been renamed Mary by the Whites, Peevay ironically suggests a potential redeemer whose efforts nevertheless cannot save his people. The Aborigines dutifully attend the party, all of them confused and shy except for Walyeric and her increasingly radicalized son, Peevay, who had hoped to combat the Whites through his knowledge of English and the ways of British society but will soon honor his mother’s legacy by turning to violence. Reverend Wilson, who attends the affair along with Dr. Potter— the Sincerity has fi nally reached Tasmania—attempts a religious discussion with Peevay’s mother that goes awry, as Peevay recalls in his retelling. Referring to Wilson’s attempt to discover Eden, Walyeric responds, “But this cannot be. You say God made Eden Garden long ago? Well, everybody knows God never came here till you white men brought him in your boats.” “‘God was here before us,’ Vicar Wilson told her in his cleverness. ‘You see, God is everywhere, and always was.’” Upon further questioning, Wilson explains that “God is in sky and deepest places of the sea. He is in mountains and trees. He is in birds and animals and fishes too. Most of all, he is in us.” Wilson’s pantheism, which fits better with the Aborigines’ animistic belief than it does with Anglicanism, does not impress Peevay’s mother in the least. “Then he is in you?” she asks with mock innocence. Upon Wilson’s answer that such is the case—and undoubtedly the priest believes there is more divinity in himself than in anyone else—Walyeric concludes, “So he must be in your dirty stinking arse, Vicar? Poor old bugger God, isn’t he stuck in there?” (314). Walyeric’s profanity creates a sensation, but it also signifies religion as the servant of colonialism, for her question figuratively turns racist violations by professed Christians back onto themselves. These violations become metaphorically sexual, which in turn connects to the literal rape of Walyeric/Mary—whose pregnancy with Peevay results from something quite different than the Immaculate Conception. This episode is followed by her fi nal gesture of subversive resistance.

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Just when the commemorative photograph is about to be taken, Walyeric purposely knocks over and breaks the equipment, collapses, and dies, bringing the nativity play, which had been going on in the background, to a halt. But soon the play is resumed and the equipment repaired, allowing the remaining Aborigines, except for Peevay who refuses to have anything to do with it, to have their picture taken anyway. Walyeric also is photographed as Mrs. Denton has her dead body propped up for the occasion. “Christianity” reigns, the natives are photographically fi xed as dead history, and Walyeric’s defiance has had no effect, except that it sets Peevay on a course of further defiance. The Christmas party has other outcomes, however, in that Wilson seizes upon the idea of enlisting Peevay as a guide into unknown parts of Tasmania and Potter becomes fi xated upon Walyeric’s corpse as a scientifically appealing specimen. In their various ways, and despite Wilson’s and Potter’s differences, religion and science in various guises continue to conspire to promote and obfuscate the violation of the Tasmanian Aborigines.

V Potter’s interest in Walyeric’s corpse, a reduction of the native Tasmanians’ significance to a matter of anatomical curiosity, expresses his commitment to scientific racism—or, more accurately, to racist “science”: her body necessarily must disclose information about the nature of Aboriginal inferiority. In the epilogue to his novel, Matthew Kneale cites Robert Knox’s The Races of Men, a fragment (1850) as the catalyst for the kind of thinking he ascribes to his character Dr. Thomas Potter.7 Kneale identifies Knox (1791–1862) as “among the fi rst writers to claim that the various races of mankind were actually different species” and characterizes Knox’s belief that “the Saxon . . . was among the most exalted” of human groups (440). Kneale’s representation of Knox’s significance is not entirely correct, since a number of other thinkers had preceded Knox in elaborating the concept that human races are of entirely distinct natures and geneses.8 Nevertheless, in Britain Knox probably was more influential than anyone before in disseminating the theory, as does Agassiz in America, of polygenesis. Knox reacted against monogenesis and its main proponent, James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848), who was the chief force behind ethnology, the preDarwinian science of racial differences and a precursor to anthropology as a discrete discipline. Focused upon one “central problem—the unity or diversity of mankind,” ethnology was at its time “the only scholarly discourse that took [“savages”] seriously as subject matter” (Stocking 48). Knox challenges ethnology in another way regarding race by replacing its interest in contemporary cultural evidence concerning non-Europeans with sociopolitical history—especially conquests and population movements—although both Prichard and Knox were concerned with the

Paradises Lost 99 physical evidence of bones and bodies. I will elaborate on Knox’s thinking, an important example of pseudo-scientific racist theory critiqued in other neo-Victorian novels as well. Along with polygenesis Kneale assigns to Potter Knox’s contention, again not original with him, that human races represent a hierarchy of capabilities and survival worthiness stretching from Anglo-Saxons and other White groups downward through various dark-skinned races, with Aborigines at or near the bottom. Potter’s chief idea that Kneale derives from Knox, however, is that “all history was nothing more than a process of racial conflicts” (Kneale 440). According to Knox, races are naturally and irrevocably hostile toward one another, and history therefore is a process of warfare between races that winnows out lesser ones—a preDarwinian sociological version of survival of the fittest.9 In an idea suggestive of Knox, Potter imagines an eventual racial “conflagration” in which “Saxons” will crush their remaining rivals. Over the course of the novel he comes to this conclusion gradually, fi nally recording his realization, as expressed in the idiosyncratic style he uses for his journal notes, that race is “the key to comprehending all human history + also future destiny of men. Nation revolutions of 1848 = clear indication of inevitable progression of events. Self can foresee future great confl agration of nations (own term) as World = embroiled in years of confl ict, war = destruction etc. etc.” (198; emphasis original). Potter’s version of racial history connects the Armageddon predicted in the racist sermon heard by Captain Kewley with a secular version of the same, a connection in which bad religion cooperates with bad science in their dependence on dubious principles that sanction prejudice and violence. The religiously lax and open-minded Kewley stands out in sharp contrast to Potter; for example, during the Sincerity’s layover in the Cape Colony the Captain denounces the mistreatment of its dark-skinned population (166). Like Knox, Potter draws widely upon cultural and intellectual trends prominent in the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, especially those associated with natural science and the early stages of anthropology as a discipline. Scientific interest in race expanded rapidly as world commerce and colonial experience produced information and theories about non-Europeans while generating interest in the nature of humanity itself. Comparative anatomy, geological evidence of species extinctions, archeology, and philology all lent themselves, as did the anti-slavery movement, to thinking about the variety of peoples and races and the connections between them. By the early nineteenth century students of race, spurred by the growing disciplinary regularization of the sciences, attempted greater rigor in their thinking than had obtained in the past but initially with limited success since they were impeded by ethnocentricity unchallenged by reliable fi rsthand knowledge. Authorities who published on the subject of race were generally of the armchair variety, speculators dependent on spotty information gleaned directly or indirectly from travelers, returned colonists, and missionaries,

100 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels most of them heavily subject to their own cultural preconceptions and lacking clear standards for objectivity. Nevertheless, a man like Kneale’s character of Thomas Potter living in the middle of the nineteenth century would have been exposed to a broad spectrum of ideas and contentions about race and free to come up with his own variations. With the erosion of belief in the Bible’s scientific relevance, even the theory of polygenesis championed by Knox, which removed Adam and Eve as the progenitors of all humans, secured a wide if often dismissive hearing. Potter’s advocacy of polygenesis is particularly unpalatable because it rests not only on the deeply racist preconceptions that he had developed in England, but also on the limited and tendentious research he conducts on the Tasmanian expedition he undertakes for the purpose of refi ning and augmenting his biases. These he disguises from himself beneath a veneer of empiricism, but they readily surface as black humor produced by the eagerness, exaggeration, self-importance, and bizarre phrasings with which he expresses morally repulsive conclusions so clearly at odds with the ideal of scientific objectivity. Potter develops his cultural and historical prejudices along lines even cruder and more extreme than Knox’s, the differences between the two suggesting the scope of Potter’s fanaticism. First, although the connection of Potter’s ideas to Knox’s is clear in the latter’s claim to have predicted the 1848 revolutionary events in Europe, calling them a “war of race against race” (20), Potter’s prognostication goes beyond that of Knox, who envisions the triumph of the “Saxon race” in more gradualist terms than Potter’s apocalyptic ones. Second, Knox claims that the racist trajectory of history does not represent progress; he is gloomy about human nature and the fate of humanity, but Potter celebrates the extermination of non-Whites, as well as the eventual domination by Saxons of other White “races,” as a moral triumph, the telos toward which all history is directed.10 Saxon superiority, Potter asserts, is already apparent as the force behind the expansion of the British Empire (271). Third, while Potter like Knox accepts as both warranted and inevitable the widespread destruction of supposed inferior races, Knox recognizes the moral ugliness of the process, unlike Potter, who has no reservations.11 Fourth, whereas Knox discerns a degree of improvability in Blacks and predicts their survival in climes unsuitable for Whites, Potter contends that all dark-skinned races are irremediably inferior and destined to be trampled under the juggernaut of racial history: in “the great conflagration of nations . . . [w]eaker nations (e.g. black, Indian, Oriental, Norman etc. etc.) will be swept away” (198–99). Fifth, while Knox and Potter agree that Christianity is naïve in its attempts to convert and morally improve non-White societies, Potter does not share Knox’s disdain for what he sees as the imperialist hypocrisy behind missionary efforts; Potter’s tunnel vision is focused solely on racial conflict as the engine of history and on those factors that constitute the superiority and inferiority of the winners and losers.12

Paradises Lost 101 A further difference in the racial thinking between the historical figure of Knox and the fictional Potter, a difference that like the others is a matter of both degree and kind, is that Potter is more explicit than Knox in fi xing the responsibility for racial holocausts on those they destroy. He makes the point in this excerpt from The Destiny of Nations, the book he writes aboard ship traveling to and from Tasmania: In Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand—and doubtless soon also Africa—it has been one of swift and calamitous decline, even to the point of near-extinction, and in consequence it has become fashionable, in certain intellectualist and sentimentalist circles, to regard the dark-skinned . . . with feelings of pity. . . . Such a view . . . is dangerously misleading. The truth is that the Black Type, by reason of his flawed and dangerous nature, is largely the author of his own unhappy lot. (392) Potter’s attitude is reminiscent of the assertion, cited earlier (Kneale 242), that the last Tasmanian natives are responsible for their own demise because of not accepting Christianity. Again, misuses of religion and science cooperate in legitimizing the destruction of aboriginal peoples, in this case participating in the widespread practice of blaming the victims of racism and absolving the victimizers.13 Finally, Potter’s thinking resembles Knox’s in the weight he places on anatomy and embryology but differs somewhat in theory and application. Knox gives much attention to transcendental anatomy, associated in Britain with Richard Owen. Again, in this theoretical version of comparative anatomy all life forms are constructed in accordance with an overall or transcendent plan apparent in the omnipresent homologies between structural details of various species, with variations in those features determining their ways of life. This sort of physical determinism suggests different inherent capabilities of races conceived as separate species. Differences in races arise from different degrees of incomplete realization of the ideal to which the human form aspires. Knox states that the embryonic and fetal human develops “through many forms, all resembling, more or less, either different races of men from his own, or animals. . . . When his development is imperfect, it represents then some form, resembling the inferior races of men, or animals still lower in the scale of being.” Knox claims that the earlier it is in its development, the more the fetus of a European resembles that of “the Negro.” Therefore Blacks are imperfect whites and non-European physical traits are deformities, violations of the ideal (288–89, 33). Knox’s thinking here resembles the famous dictum of Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” but without Haeckel’s evolutionary component.14 Perhaps Kneale had Knox’s ideas about transcendental anatomy and embryology in mind when, again extending theories associated with Knox, he has Potter hypothesize that different races are produced by how long they remain in the womb; only the most advanced White races

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are born fully formed, all others being afflicted with a type of arrested development—a proposition he tries to prove through his inquiries about Tasmanian pregnancies (315). Knox offers no direct evidence for the physical basis of racial inferiority, allowing that not enough specimens of lesser races had been studied to settle matters conclusively, but tentatively he is ready to assume that such bases exist.15 Potter is determined to discover fi rsthand evidence. Potter expresses relatively little interest in cultural details, other than to ascribe different levels of racial inferiority to the characteristics and practices of national, ethnic, and racial “types” as he responds to the various levels of disagreeability he experiences in his personal interactions with individuals of different classes and ethnicities. For example, his exposure to the Manxmen influences him to recognize in them the laziness and unreliability of the Celt, and his lower-middle-class background causes him to resent the sense of superiority he identifies in “Norman” types like the detested Wilson—who sees himself as among “the natural betters” of those like Potter (151)—that is, in members or descendants of the traditional ruling class of England that the Saxon, compliant for too long, is destined to overthrow. Characterized by “decadence and depravity,” the Norman is lethargic, arrogant, selfish, “cunning,” and “parasitical”; his “control of that triple curse of Aristocracy, Priesthood and Monarchy” has resulted solely from “abhorrence, among his Saxon subjects, of any form of disorder.” Typically, Potter conjures physical evidence for his biases: the Norman is “slighter and altogether lacking in the [Saxon’s] rugged hardiness. . . . His facial shape is typically long and narrow, indicating arrogance. Cranial type: D” (164, 116;emphasis original). Potter writes that his “chief concern = specimens” (164), believing that the physical remains of native people will confi rm his theories. As a specimen collector, the fictional Potter reflects the example of “European race scientists [who] for decades had been collecting and measuring the bones of extinct, primitive, and, for that matter, civilized peoples” (Brantlinger 128). One of Potter’s goals, no doubt, is to obtain skulls, since he shows particular interest in them as evidence of native primitiveness. Phrenology, the determination of character from skull shape, as well as the kindred field of craniometry, the measurement of heads especially to determine intelligence, were prominent and distinctive Victorian enthusiasms and as such much beloved by neo-Victorian novelists. Along with other pseudo- or quasi-scientific avenues to knowledge—physiognomy, mesmerism, and spiritualism—they lend, especially in contrast to today’s beliefs, dramatic and often humorous possibilities to neo-Victorian fiction, spicing up and serving as counterpoint to the stodginess often associated with Victorians. One of the chapters in The Destiny of Nations concerns “skull shapes of inferior types” (290, 403). Potter’s supposed knowledge of brains and “the geography of the mind” assures him that the “structure of the brain” in “the savages of Africa” dictates

Paradises Lost 103 “a complete absence of the impulse of civilization” (154)—whereas obviously racism determines his knowledge of African brains. When Potter along with Renshaw visits the Tasmanian penal colony at Port Arthur, the doctor’s fi rst questions to the official who shows them about are, “Has any attempt been made to study the physical features of the criminals here? Or likewise their origins?” Potter’s mania about physical evidence of racial inferiority, paralleling Wilson’s obsession with fi nding Eden, together drive most of the action in the fi nal stages of English Passengers, where fl awed expressions of science and religion, essentially imperialistic in expanding the domain of British or European power-knowledge, encounter Peevay and the last of the Tasmanian Aborigines.

VI In the crossing from Australia to Tasmania, Potter prevails upon Captain Kewley, much to the disgust of Wilson who wants to get on with his quest for Eden, to stop at Flinder’s Island, which the doctor explains “had been a refuge for aborigines of Tasmania, and that items of value might be found amid the remains of their settlement” (275). It is understood that his actual goal is to locate the remains of bodies. He carries that same ambition to Tasmania and Port Arthur, where he steals Waleyric’s corpse from the hospital where it had been taken and dissects her. After proving to his satisfaction that the specimen bears multiple signs of inferiority to the “hardy Saxon type,” he dumps the remains into the ocean except for Walyeric’s bones and an “amulet round carcass’ neck . . . containing some form bones [sic]” offering “[g]ood instance savage superstition [sic]” (329; emphasis original). From earlier in the story we know the amulet contains fragments of bones from Walyeric’s ancestors—signs, sadly ironic under the circumstances, of connectedness and continuity. The novel presents Walyeric as not quite the last full-blooded native Tasmanian, but her fate reflects the historical figure of Truganini, who died in 1876, generally identified as the last of her race, and of other aboriginal peoples such as those depicted in Barrett’s Voyage of the Narwhal. Truganini is reported to have begged those who attended her on her deathbed that she not be dissected, and although she escaped that fate—unlike what happened to the corpse of the last native male—her body was stolen from her grave and her skeleton ended up in a Tasmanian museum where it remained on display for most of a century (Brantlinger 129).16 Barrett seems to have incorporated this episode in Voyage of the Narwhal. In English Passengers Potter takes Walyeric’s bones with him on Wilson’s expedition in search of Eden, hoping ultimately to return with them to England, where he intends to make his reputation through them and especially The Destiny of Nations. However, having figured out what had happened to his mother’s remains through some deft detective work, Peevay joins up

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as a guide for Wilson’s expedition, which now includes some hired hands, Englishmen from Hobart. Peevay’s real purpose is somehow to reclaim his mother’s bones, which he believes must be hidden among the supplies packed onto mules, and then to cremate them in a proper traditional ceremony. He has no interest in leading the expedition anywhere in particular, looking instead for opportunity to take the bones and to take revenge on the whites. Although for a time Potter’s endeavors in scientific racism seem successful, Wilson’s religious and geological ambitions soon meet insurmountable difficulties as the explorers grow weary, Eden fails to materialize, Peevay proves unhelpful, and Potter and others turn mutinous. Initially, however, fi red by his enthusiasms and imagined signs from God, Wilson presses the men into rough and unknown terrain. Convinced of God’s preoccupation with him and his fate, for a while he convinces himself that severe obstacles and setbacks simply mean God is testing him and that faith will yet lead him to Eden and to the heat-resistant rocks that will prove his theory of divine refrigeration and confound “atheist geologists” (346). But fi nally even Potter’s immense self-assurance and faith in divine providence weaken, and for once we see something uncharacteristic, sincere, and insightful emerge from this generally cartoonish character: religious doubt and a fear of meaninglessness that all along must have underlain his megalomaniacal ambition. “All at once,” he confesses, “I felt myself haunted by a terrible vision, of a world without guidance: a land of emptiness, where all was ruled by the madness of chance. How could one endure such a place, where all significance was lost? I myself would mean nothing, but would merely be a kind of self-invention: a speck upon the wind, calling myself Wilson. I felt my spirit waver” (358). “What the vicar shrinks from is, of course, the abyss of modernity, the unscripted, non-scriptural universe that will be a commonplace of the advanced thought and literature of the century following his own” (Ross 255). Potter’s reaction is similar to the painful doubts that affl icted more than a few Victorians and that show up in a number of neo-Victorian novels, doubts responding especially to the scientific erosion of traditional religious beliefs and values. Such may have been Kneale’s inspiration for Wilson’s vision of a cold, alien, and daunting universe, but Wilson’s reaction suggests that religion itself, especially in its most obsessive manifestations, might in essence constitute a human defense against having to acknowledge such a universe. Wilson soon returns to his old fi xations, but now he is even more clearly unhinged. Meanwhile Peevay, appalled by the desecration of his mother’s body, stalks and picks off various members of the expedition who had wished to kill him: “Killing was better, yes, as that is being hateful and afraid, which is some esteem, while this cutting and playing was just a scornful thing, odious as could be. This was making her small, into nothing at all, not even dirt” (330–31).

Paradises Lost 105 VII English Passengers is a moralizing exercise of neo-Victorian blame fi xing, restoration, and restitution. Through Peevay and his story the Aborigines are returned to life, if not as they actually existed, then at least with great respect and as much imaginative fidelity as is reasonable in view of limited historical knowledge of native Tasmanian society. Peevay’s is a remarkably distinctive voice made up of standard English; of native words, constructions, and concepts; and of lingo picked up from seal hunters, transported criminals, and other common colonials. His derivative language runs counter to the simple and seemingly simple-minded speech usually provided “non-native speakers of English. . . . Peevay’s vocabulary and sentence structure are complex” (Susan Barrett 196). Furthermore, “Peevay’s idiom . . . conveys . . . the radical innocence of his perceptions. According to Michael Ross, the candour of his gaze and speech allows Kneale to “‘make strange’—to relativize—the key myths that Westerners have naturalized as part of the very fabric of civilization” (263). Many of these myths, including Europeans’ right and duty to subjugate others, are supported by the misappropriations of science and religion that the book satirizes through the extreme cases of Potter and Wilson and opposes through the resistance of Peevay. One form of resistance is his power of language that allows him, as he increasingly understands the violence to which he and his people are subjected, to articulate the forms of aggression he witnesses and personalize them in the story of his life. Several times he claims that his greatest skill is simply in enduring, but his equal genius lies in efficient and colorful storytelling. As a personality he is intensely engaged with all he has seen and done, even though many of his experiences are tragic. His most characteristic response is to fi nd occurrences and other phenomena “interesting.” Peevay murders several whites, but these acts are hard to regret in view of his history and their nastiness. He is an attractive character, and his moral payoff is as good as difficult circumstances allow. Through his growing anger at the Whites he recovers his mother’s approval in her final days, and he also succeeds in recovering her bones and cremating them in the traditionally prescribed manner. Furthermore, on the expedition and after abandoning it he is able to revert temporarily to an Aboriginal lifestyle that connects him to the land, his ancestors, and his mother. Then he is able to rejoin a community far more to his liking than the internment camps at Flinders Island and Oyster Bay. Hoping to fulfill his mother’s desire to kill Peevay’s father, the rapist and woman abductor Jack Harp, Peevay goes to the island where Harp and others had established a seal-hunting station. Harp is dead, but Peevay discovers a community of many other mixed-breed products of the abduction of native women by Harp and other White hunters. For the fi rst time in his life he is not an alien, for he perceives these others as “my own brothers and sisters” (433). Because of its thematic and emotional weight and its culminating position in Peevay’s narrative, in the novel

106 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels this occurrence emotionally balances off the destruction of the aboriginal Tasmanians. But nothing is simple here. Peevay does connect, both before and after her death, with the Aboriginal mother whose love he had always sought, but he also faces his painful half-breed status in meeting the progeny of his monstrous White father. Peevay’s great wish is to fight against the Whites, “those heinous pissers” who nevertheless are also part of his cultural heritage, like the English language he uses to express his defiance. He plans to teach his new mixed-race band about the past, an education focused not so much on their native heritage but on learning the ways of Whites so they can be defeated (434). Mariadele Boccardi says of Peevay’s new companions, “[t]he peaceful co-existence of this variegated group offers Peevay an alternative paradise to either the Biblical one that is no more than an expression of colonial power or the one he knew as a child and lost with colonization” (123). In view of actual history or that attested to in the rest of the novel, however, it is hard to imagine the future of Peevay or his group as paradisiacal. Nevertheless, Peevay has gained a newly grounded sense of himself productive of confidence and purpose. Though this reinforced self is morally and practically problematic, informed by hatred of the colonists whose language and culture constitute one aspect of it, he fi nds identity in hybridity and survives to narrate his life into a wholeness and to give it, despite all the pain he has suffered, an ending more happy than not. And in a sense he keeps the indigenous Tasmanians and their culture alive by telling their story.17 Peevay’s fate stands in contrast to that of the negative characters who get what they deserve, with Wilson a failure in his quest for Eden and entirely demented and the egregious Potter drowned but, through a mix-up following the sinking and later salvaging of the Sincerity off the coast of England, skeletally displayed in London as a native Tasmanian. He becomes an ironic substitution for Walyeric’s remains and an apt emblem for scientific and racist stripping away of humanity and fellow feeling; also, as Boccardi points out, the substitution undermines Potter’s beliefs by showing “it is impossible to tell the difference between races according to purely physical parameters” (124). Whatever inherent morality Potter and Wilson possessed had been co-opted by ego-driven ideologies providing what seem ethical imperatives but in fact having nothing to do with the sympathy or concern for others that underlies moral understanding. In its regard for ethics English Passengers humanizes the story of imperialistic destruction, dramatizing its covert and overt operations while giving voice to its victims. It demonstrates how rigid ideologies and self-delusions contribute to the colonial enterprise. This chapter has argued that it does so especially through the deployment of science and religion as powerful instruments for legitimizing what should be unthinkable. Voyage of the Narwhal makes this case but English Passengers does so far more forcibly. The novel ends on a comic note with Potter’s skeleton on display, and comedy throughout the novel is one of the ways—Peevay’s entertaining

Paradises Lost 107 language and his interest in all that he narrates are others—that keeps the grim subject of genocide from overwhelming the novel. According to Boccardi, Peevay’s “narrative stands in contrast with the European version of aboriginal history in that it is ultimately a story of survival rather than extinction: the elegiac tone of the former is replaced by the continuous selfreinvention engendered by the progressive acquisition of discursive ability and the parallel appropriation of its means of expression” (122). Nevertheless, the sense of loss remains strong, balancing off redemption and nostalgia, a desirable future and a desired past. It is true that as Peevay travels across the land on his way to Harp’s island he recovers something of his childhood world “where I knew all blossom scents, where I could tell the stories inside every rock and river” (138). This experience is in line with George Levine’s notion of “re-enchantment,” the possibility of a revitalized experience of natural reality, though here it is an imagined Aboriginal rather than Darwinian one. The experience of Renshaw, who also undergoes a self-affi rmative process of reinvention, suggests that discovering an affinity for nature is a possibility for everyone. Throughout most of the English Passengers Renshaw is a purposeless, self-alienated minor character who functions primarily as an amused reporter of Wilson’s and Potter’s oddities and feuds, but at the end of the novel he comes into his own. On Wilson’s expedition into the interior he develops an appreciation for the wildness of the Tasmanian environment along with a new sensory and aesthetic acuteness in apprehending it (361), and later he decides he will stay in Tasmania, become a farmer, and, it appears, achieve a kind of balance between culture and a natural world he has learned to savor. But “nostalgia” operates here as well because he stands as a colonial replacement for the native Tasmanian. After Renshaw on horseback chases down a wayward sheep and returns covered with dust, a girl tells him, with powerful though unintentional irony, that he “look[s] like a real Tasmanian” (430). A “real” Tasmanian, of course, is not a colonial but an indigenous one. This is the novel’s most concentrated mixture of gain and loss. The colonial ideal of tamed nature, or the redemption of a once purposeless young man through the colonial experience, is not allowed to erase the absence of what went before. For Peevay, the nearest thing to “a real Tasmanian” to be found at the end of the novel, nature is neither wild nor pastoral, neither alien nor improvable by culture: the forests and mountains are simply home, a place of origin and belonging more intensely felt than any Englishman could comprehend, and now they are about to be lost: Weather was bright as I walked across the world for the last time, trees getting lovely with autumn, but it was mournful to think I was the final Palawa here, and after me there would just be white scuts or nobody. This never could be their place, I did divine. Yes, they could go hither and thither, thinking IT IS MINE NOW, but they never would feel it like

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Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels my ones did. How could they when they didn’t know anywhere’s name, or how it got there? Num [Whites] never would have this place deep inside their breasts, no. They would just be dwelling here.” (403–04)

That world, contrasting with the illegitimacy of Wilson’s Eden, will never exist again because it can never be fully known and lived that way again. That particular structure of understanding and feeling is disappearing forever. English Passengers pays respects to what it imagines as a lost paradise of heart and mind while condemning those failures—emotional and intellectual, religious and scientific—that destroyed it. Both Barrett’s and Kneale’s novels enact and regret the destruction that accompanies modern alienation from the universe but intimate, through its most positive characters, the possibility of reconnection and re-enchantment. John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman also allows for this possibility, though only as an outcome of prior existentialist alienation, in the context of the Darwinian revolution and crises of faith in not just religion but the values and practices that have characterized modernity.

5

Evolution and the Uncrucified Jesus The French Lieutenant’s Woman

I Stressing the challenges of nineteenth-century geology and fossils to mainstream religious beliefs and ideals, previous chapters delineated forms of conflict and accommodation that neo-Victorian novels variously adapt to their purposes; The Bone Hunter and English Passengers represent some of these forms as destructive. This chapter takes as its subject John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, published in 1969, which renders religious and other implications of a Darwinian intellectual and imaginative upheaval that built upon geological and paleontological evidence. As discussed earlier, the idea of biological evolution predated The Origin of Species and had already provoked great interest and controversy regarding Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, whose fi rst edition, published in 1844, was followed by nine others prior to 1859. But on the basis of both theory and evidence, Darwinism eclipsed Chambers’s highly speculative, relatively crude treatment of evolution, as well as Lamarck’s earlier one, and produced in Britain and beyond, if not a cultural earthquake, certainly a great tremor whose reverberations have never disappeared. A number of neo-Victorian novelists have found irresistible this foment in Victorian society and lives. Remarkable Creatures, The Voyage of the Narwhal, and English Passengers are set prior to the Darwinian disruption and take little account of pre-Darwinian evolutionary theory. In Ever After the advent of Darwinism only helps confi rm Charles Pearce’s atheism that had already developed over many years in reaction to Lyellian geology and to having seen a fossil ichthyosaur. The Bone Hunter is concerned not with Darwinian evolution but with its late nineteenth-century misapplication as social Darwinism. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, however, set the stage for later neo-Victorian novels by drawing on the psychological, social, and philosophical implications and applications of Darwin’s ideas in both the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. The novels highlighted in following chapters all concern post-1859 Victorian civilization and take account of Darwin and his legacy. I have made 1859 and the Origin central to this book, both thematically and chronologically, because the Darwinian

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revolution looms so large in neo-Victorian novels dealing with science and religion. The French Lieutenant’s Woman is set in the 1860s. It is in that novel that Mary Anning, Lyme Regis, and the ichthyosaur fictionally appear together for the first time, and Fowles was groundbreaking in directing attention to Anning’s accomplishments. A resident of Lyme himself, he was well qualified to commemorate her: “The remarkable Mary Anning,” the narrator reports, was “a woman without formal education but with a genius for discovering good—and on many occasions then unclassified—specimens. She was the first person to see the bones of Ichthyosaurus platyodon; and one of the meanest disgraces of British paleontology is that although many scientists of her day gratefully used her finds to establish their own reputation, not one native type bears the specific anningii” (45). Like many other neo-Victorian novels, and especially so those examined in this book, Fowles’s novel commits itself to social justice by exposing the cultural limitations that keep people locked in their places, dealing with these issues primarily through its protagonists Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff. Naturalist Charles Smithson visits “the Old Fossil Shop” once run by Anning (45) while visiting Lyme to be with his fiancée, Ernestina Freeman, likewise on vacation from London and staying with her aunt. Fossils will lead to Smithson’s traumatic release from the stultifying conventionality posed by his engagement to the inoffensive Ernestina—“earnest” in her desire to uphold Victorian propriety—and all his marriage to her would entail. The direct means of this freedom is Sarah Woodruff, the enigmatic siren and de facto proto-feminist who draws Smithson into new and frightening psychological territory by releasing him from the determinants of his Victorian world as she releases herself as well. Fossils will bring Smithson and Sarah together and bear upon the issue of how people are most likely to lead fulfilling lives. The French Lieutenant’s Woman explores the question of what if anything matters in the face of life’s limitations and losses, and it offers a variation on the response of the novels already discussed. But again dramas of faith play important parts. Fowles’s novel laid the groundwork for many later neo-Victorian novels and especially those dealing with science and religion. Writing in 2008, Peter Preston observes that “[a]t a distance of almost forty years since it was fi rst published, it can be seen that it . . . heralded a new interest in the nineteenth century as the location for historical fiction, an interest that has continued until the present and has intensified since the beginning of the 1990s” (91). Part of the novel’s influence has been to encourage others to adapt postmodern practices to fiction about the nineteenth century. Influenced by the anti-authoritarianism and existentialism of Fowles and his historical provenance, its literary postmodernism distances itself from realism and plays with other generic conventions. The novel employs an intrusive and not fully reliable narrator, slippery in his inconsistencies, who, claiming co-identity with author John Fowles, denies agency as creator and director in the telling of his story.

Evolution and the Uncrucified Jesus 111 Furthermore, he insists on the fictionality of his fiction and specifically the spuriousness of closed, determinate narrative forms with clear-cut beginnings and endings and intelligible causations of actions and events. Also apparent is the skepticism of this voice about received truths concerning the past and about human behavior—while nonetheless delivering authoritative pronouncements about history, society, and human nature. He will not play by the rules and yet does so enough to destabilize the conventional novelistic enterprise all the more. Like Bill Unwin in Ever After, he forthrightly acknowledges his re-creation of history as a mixture of fact and fiction, but also like Unwin he sets himself against committed postmodern skepticism by attempting to manifest the real thing, the primary truth of human reality, which in his case is not a condition or aspect of being but rather existential freedom in opposition to, among other things, romantic love and its insufficiencies. Pursuing the tactic of translating natural science into non-scientific cultural contexts and religion into secular ones, the novel attaches this freedom to the presence of fossils at Lyme Regis, exploring how people might escape their fi xed or fossilized identities and evolve into fluid existences freed from the grip of social formulation. This chapter explains, fi rst, how Fowles uses fossils to represent the struggle of Charles Smithson who, no longer attached to conventional Christianity, still fi nds himself caught between being petrified in the safety of social convention and risking self-development, and, second, how, through the novel’s appropriation and reapplication of Christian stories, symbols, and beliefs, Smithson’s agonistic path toward existential freedom leads through Darwinian evolution.

II Like Mathew Pearce, Smithson we are told pursued natural history while at the university but unlike the other began to reject religion while still there. No overt religious crisis of faith occurred, perhaps because he came from a worldly, well-to-do background. Rather, he underwent a trial involving, not doctrine, but a lingering Christian morality that often continued to influence nineteenth-century unbelievers and sometimes was even endorsed by them as necessary for social order.1 His crisis at that time, such as it was, took the form of a clash between moral injunction and sexual desire, a confl ict that will assume an undercover existence in his life after it ostensibly had been resolved. The amused narrator notes that at college Smithson initially accepted the doctrines of the Anglican Church and then only superficially and temporarily held on to them in reaction to his guilt over sexual impropriety: At Cambridge, having duly crammed his classics and subscribed to the Thirty-nine Articles [of Anglican doctrine], he had (unlike most young

112

Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels men of his times), actually begun to learn something. But in his second year there he had drifted into a bad set and ended up, one foggy night in London, in carnal possession of a naked girl. He rushed from her plump Cockney arms into those of the Church horrifying his father one day shortly afterwards by announcing that he wished to take Holy Orders.

In response his father, who died shortly afterward, sent him to Paris where “his tarnished virginity was soon blackened out of recognition; but so, as his father had hoped, was his intended marriage with the Church” (14). Charles abandoned his reactive and reactionary attachment to Anglicanism as a sanctuary from bodily sin, a refuge he had sought apparently because of Catholic-leaning High Church authoritarianism and ceremonialism: Charles saw what stood behind the seductive appeal of the Oxford Movement—Roman Catholicism propria terra. He declined to fritter his negative but comfortable English soul—one part irony to one part convention—on incense and papal infallibility. . . . he fi ngered and skimmed his way through a dozen religious theories of the time, but emerged in the clear a healthy agnostic. What little God he managed to derive from existence, he found in Nature, not the Bible. . . . In company he would go to morning service of a Sunday; but on his own, he rarely did. (14–15) He had rejected religion as a vocation or even an interest, although, as unbelievers sometimes have found, its latent emotional appeal can remain only to surface in moments of crisis. As the novel begins, Smithson fi nds himself not only, in his view, comfortably agnostic but also independently wealthy, heir to the title of baronet and a country estate he expects to inherit from his unmarried uncle, still interested in natural history, blessed or cursed with much free time, and looking for something to do. Therefore he builds upon his interest in geology by becoming a fossil collector with pretenses toward serious scientific investigation; for him these are far more congenial excuses for existence than religion. Like most novels studied in this book, The French Lieutenant’s Woman signifies a shift from religious to secularized epistemologies, a theme that later will emerge regarding the novel’s involvement with evolution. Following college Smithson “had become increasingly interested in paleontology; that, he had decided, was his field. He began to frequent the conversazioni of the Geological Society” (16). The narrator paints him as a dilettante but, with characteristic inconsistency, also asserts that Charles’s interest in earth history expresses an admirable contrast to the present-centeredness of the present day: “[I]t was men not unlike Charles . . . who laid the foundations of all our modern science. . . . They sensed that current accounts of the world were inadequate . . . they knew . . . that they had things to discover, and that the discovery was of the utmost importance to the future of man.

Evolution and the Uncrucified Jesus 113 We think . . . the only things of utmost importance to us concern the present of man” (47). The novel punctuates its frequent criticisms of Victorianism with occasional expressions of qualified admiration as it contrasts it with late twentieth-century attitudes; like other neo-Victorian novels it hybridizes present and past but through its postmodern exertions does so in a particularly vigorous and, in its inconsistencies, problematic fashion. Nevertheless, The French Lieutenant’s Woman suggests that some things matter—that something might be “of utmost importance”—and Charles’s dedication to fossils, as superficial as it might seem, enables the novel’s didacticism about the lessons the present might derive from the past when individuals separate themselves from its determinations. What clearly does not matter for the novel in any positive way is traditional organized religion. The quasi-Catholicism of the Oxford Movement means nothing more for Charles than a reaction formation or refuge arising from sexual guilt; evangelical Christianity is embodied in the form of Sarah’s malicious employer, the egregiously hypocritical Mrs. Poulteney; and Ernestina’s father, though afforded some respect, inherits the Puritan tradition of reconciling an anti-materialist religion with providential wealth while disguising the matter with dour Victorian earnestness appropriate for a religiously devout member of the nouveau riche. In Smithson’s case, Christian ideas and conventions become appropriated in the service of a secularist and existential version of truth. Fossils play a preparatory role in this process, and not simply because they undermine Genesis, but because like religion they are made to address the crucial question of how people should lead their lives. Fossils are suggestively present from the start. Charles Smithson and his fiancée Ernestina Freeman walk out upon the Cobb, the great breakwater at Lyme Regis, and she teases him, the fossil hunter, by telling him that unknowingly he had been walking on fossils embedded in the stones that form the structure: “[Y]ou’ve been walking on them now for at least a minute—and haven’t deigned to remark them.” Smithson kneels down and exclaims, “By jove, look at this. Certhidium portlandicum. This stone must come from the oolite at Portland.” She responds, “In whose quarries I shall condemn you to work in perpetuity—if you don’t get to your feet at once” (8). This brief episode hints at the spuriousness of Smithson’s seeming self-confidence and awareness—he does not see what is under his own feet—and Ernestina’s conventionality in insisting he not kneel beside her there in public. The Cobb itself would seem a fit symbol for stability and endurance, but the fossils of dead organisms and extinct species attest to the relatively ephemeral nature of all things, including the relationship of the engaged couple, and in context pose the question of what might form a fi rm foundation for human existence. When the couple comes to “rough steps down to a lower walk,” Ernestina comments, “These are the very steps that Jane Austen made Louisa Musgrove fall down in Persuasion.” “How romantic,” Smithson remarks,

114 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels to which she responds, “Gentlemen were romantic . . . then.” The exchange is playful but again significant because the novel will demonstrate that the idealizations of romance form a poor foundation for human relationships. “Shall we make the perilous descent?” Smithson then asks. The idea of falling and “perilous descent” also foreshadow what is to come, the descent and danger of falling involved in throwing off social orthodoxies and of abandoning safety for the unknown. In response to her companion’s question about taking the stairs, she says, “On the way back” (8). If they had descended and taken the lower walk all might have been different, but instead they go on their way and fi nally recognize the figure whom they had seen from afar standing at the end of the Cobb: “Once again they walked on. It was only then that he noticed, or at least realized the sex of, the figure at the end.” Ernestina explains that it is Sarah Woodruff, “the French lieutenant’s woman,” also known to locals a “Tragedy” because, it is believed, she had been abandoned by her French lover and for that reason habitually stands looking out to sea awaiting his return. Smithson is intrigued by the story, by the mysteriousness of this figure of purported tragedy and by her “sex,” and therefore will soon become entangled in her life with the result that his life will change forever. He approaches her, ostensibly worried about the wind that buffets her near the edge of the seawall, and although she says nothing in response to his overture he is captured by her distant and alluring demeanor and by the open glance she directs at him lacking the ladylike demureness prescribed by the time. In contrast to its ordinariness, an engaged couple going for a walk, the episode on the Cobb offers the fi rst suggestions of an existential universe that not only dwarfs hopes and expectations with spatial and temporal indifference but also, in its randomness, imaged in the agitated sea all about, seems to confound choices with the unpredictability of their consequences. A little later in the novel Smithson searches for fossils in a rocky, mazelike, and overgrown area near Lyme called the Undercliff, the eroded, jumbled, and secluded remnant of a one-time cliff that stair-steps down to the sea. At some earlier point he had decided that specializing would make him more special, thus infusing his dilettantism with seriousness, so that Charles now concentrates on “tests”—relatively uncommon fossils of an extinct type of sea urchin on which he “had fi xed his heart” (45–46); he has not really fi xed his heart on Ernestina but will do so on Sarah with whom the tests become associated. Suggesting again a world in which contingency confusedly mixes with human choice, in search of these artifacts Charles walks with little sense of direction along a trail through a terrain marked by chaotic history and makes nearly arbitrary choices when he comes to forks in his path. He fi nally reaches a secluded spot, looks over the edge of a drop-off to get his bearings, and sees Sarah lying on a ledge below him where it is unlikely anyone would see her. Aware of the impropriety of an engaged man being alone with another woman,

Evolution and the Uncrucified Jesus 115 and especially one of Sarah’s reputation—she is also locally known as “the French lieutenant’s whore”—he nevertheless feels compelled to talk to her and becomes intrigued all the more by the uniqueness of her appearance, words, gestures, and facial expressions so at variance with women he has known including Ernestina. Again seemingly minor choices and randomness contribute to major changes in the lives of protagonists, choices that lead to a testing of Smithson’s understanding of himself and his world. This fi rst meeting between himself and Sarah leads to two more in the Undercliff, in each case a mixture of chance—their converging is more unlikely than not—and of volition recognized as such by Sarah but only dimly so by Smithson although he could have picked other areas for hunting fossils. He is often distanced from his true motivations, though perhaps no more so than most people. He has no idea that he is submitting himself to a test. A. A. DeVitis and William J. Palmer point out that the word “test” functions as a pun in the novel—that although early on we are told that Smithson had “fi xed his heart on tests,” after his fi rst meeting with Sarah in the Undercliff and fully recognizing the danger she poses to his reputation and way of life, for a couple of days he “banned from his mind thoughts of the tests lying waiting to be discovered; and thoughts, now associated with them, of women lying asleep on sunlit ledges” (DeVitis 96; Fowles 135). This construction intimates what is truly working on his mind. The allurements of sunlight and a recumbent woman and the danger of a ledge, these elements together suggest “tests lying waiting” for him, trials both desirable and terrifying. During their third encounter in the Undercliff Sarah, having by chance learned of Charles’s avocation, presents him with two tests she has found in a search we are told must have taken some time and effort because of the uncommonness of this type of fossil: “She delved into the pockets of her coat and presented to him, one in each hand, two excellent Micraster tests” (138; emphasis original). DeVitis and Palmer comment that “Charles pockets the tests, not realizing that she has handed him the symbols of his manhood, the opportunity for selfhood through human involvement” (96). Apparently having noticed the similarity between “tests” and “testes”—an echo perhaps too obvious to need articulating—the two critics claim that Charles lacks courage in wanting but, given the opportunity, not committing himself to Sarah and that “when he is tested again and again by Sarah, he repeatedly fails” (96). But Charles’s semi-unconscious efforts to encounter Sarah indicate that he at least is willing to submit himself to tests and that, as he increasingly realizes, staying with Ernestina and going with Sarah both are temptations fraught with danger for the integrity of his self-identity and that he will have to make a choice. After receiving the two tests from Sarah and discussing the fossils with her, Smithson asks, “May I help you back to the path” (138, 139), but a long interchange ensues in which Sarah gives an explanation of her sad history, her frustrations with the limitations on her life, and the motivations for her odd behavior including her public display of “tragedy,”

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motivations that remain largely enigmatic to Charles and somewhat so to readers. Their hesitant intimacy increases along with the fascination that Smithson feels—impelled by dissatisfaction with his own life and by sexual attraction, which he tries to ignore—because of her confusing mixture of deference and forwardness, “feminine” weakness and “masculine” strength, conventionality and unconventionality. But she is unwilling to go “back to the path” of conventional understandings and behavior, of safety and predictability, and through some mixture of design, chance, and opportunism she will make it impossible for him as well. Unknowingly or not Sarah tests Charles in a number of ways, tests to determine if he is “man enough” to break away from the heavily conditioned path of his life and assume a new existence of danger and possibility as she had done and is doing in embracing the role of a fallen woman, putting herself beyond the pale, and in capturing his emotions and imagination. Once the pun on “tests” is recognized several statements retroactively take on additional meaning by indicating that, one way or another, he will not be able to return to his old path of life. For example, he maladroitly offers to “pay for these tests” (164), to give her money for the two fossils she had given him, and indeed he will pay in ways he could never imagine when his relationship with Sarah leads to further disgrace for her, to sexual consummation, to Smithson’s moment of choice, to his renunciation of engagement to Ernestina, to disgrace and humiliation, to Sarah’s disappearance, to his lengthy quest to fi nd her again, and to the novel’s famous double ending inviting readers to choose a preferred conclusion—a test for them as well. Fossils, especially in their connection to geology, are highly multivocal, a point apparent in Fowles’s handling of the Undercliff where Charles Smithson has the opportunity, for which he is not yet ready, to learn humility because of the vastness of geological time but also because of his and his culture’s interactions with the natural order in general. Fowles possesses a Hardy-like sense of the temporal relationship of natural to human history that Smithson lacks despite his involvement with fossils. In their essay about the Undercliff ’s history as it is fictionalized by Fowles, Liz-Anne Bawden, Kevin Padian, and Hugh S. Torrens connect implications of geology and fossils that inform the narrative: Fowles is not only an accomplished observer of nature, but also a synthesizer of its grand dimensions of time, space, and life. He weaves the great history of the many layers of the Undercliff ’s geology into the uses that humans make of it—whether scientific, agricultural, or amorous. He allows fossils to stand as symbols of human interaction as well as providing mute testimony to a long-dead past unwitnessed by human eyes. He educates his audience about the depths of time and the imponderables of existence that presented themselves to Victorian scientists, while treating the exercise as a mere pastime for a bored gentleman. The narrative’s seemingly anachronistic jumps from 1867

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to 1968 are . . . part of the same flow in which the scales of time converge, to express a continuity of history between the ancient past of the ammonites and before, down to the present day. (151) Fossils intimate both discontinuity and continuity, disconnectedness and connectedness, as do neo-Victorian novels in general. In their discovery and in their connection to evolution fossils can purport death or entrapment but also adaptive change and the potential for liberation as they are uncovered and related to the rest of life. Initially fossils seemed to offer Smithson freedom from routine in a selfaffi rming activity, but after meeting Sarah at Lyme and becoming entangled with her over the course of just a few days they come to represent entrapment. In a sense they have done so all along in that, although he is genuinely interested in them, fossils had in fact supplied an excuse for stasis in place of self-understanding and potential for living a vital existence. Charles now sees himself as a fossil caught in freedom-negating circumstances as his relation with Sarah develops to the degree that it seems certain to expose their relationship and undermine his engagement, reputation, and self-worth, circumstances from which he does not know how to extricate himself. Therefore he compares himself to an ammonite, fossils of which are common in the cliffs surrounding Lyme: “He kept saying to himself, I must do something, I must act. And a kind of anger at his weakness swept over him—a wild determination to make some gesture that would show he was more than an ammonite stranded in a drought” (209). Charles then confides in the local physician Dr. Grogan and is temporarily relieved when the wise old practitioner and fellow “Darwinian” assumes the task of meeting with Sarah and of sensitively but permanently removing her from Smithson’s life. But feeling unjust and disloyal, and again feeling her allure, the young man soon reconsiders his decision, concluding that he had unconscionably transferred his moral responsibility to Grogan “[b]ecause he was more concerned to save appearances than his own soul. Because he had no more free will than an ammonite” (237). His path to freedom goes by way of Sarah and tests even harsher than the one he anticipates when he precludes Grogan’s intervention by seeing Sarah once again himself. Later I will pick up on this episode and the remainder of the novel in light of its applications of Darwinism. Charles’s recognition of his failure to try to “save his own soul” suggests that verbal or notional traces of religion do not readily disappear even for non-believers. But if “religion,” a word whose Greek root denotes tying or binding together, can be broadened to mean that which ties the world together and a person to the world in some self-integrating fashion that gives life meaning, then all of the neo-Victorian novels studied in this book are positive about “religion” in that broad, unconventional sense. Even The French Lieutenant’s Woman with its alienated and alienating universe and its focus on individual choice directs its readers toward something

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genuine and self-affirming, or self-creating, a process in which alienation can become a less daunting experience once accepted as a portal to new possibilities. On several occasions the novel secularizes Bible narratives in ways that support this broad definition of religion. For example, we are told that possessing something is as much a deterrent to freedom as is being possessed, and thus that rejecting the temptation to possess is paramount. The narrator approves of those who “rejected or reject the notion of possession as the purpose of life, whether it be of a woman’s body, or of high profit at all costs, or of the right to dictate the speed of progress. . . . This is the great and timeless relevance of the New Testament myth of the Temptation in the wilderness. All who have insight and education have automatically their own wilderness; and at some point in their life they will have their temptation. Their rejection may be foolish; but it is never evil” (295). Self-integrity necessitates resisting the temptation to possess, even if such rejection seems foolish because of leading to social or some other kind of discomfort. Although at no one particular point does Charles abjure the need to possess fossils, their temptation disappears as a validation of his existence after Sarah presents him with “tests” and opens up for him the possibility of an existence beyond the temptation to possess anything, even her.

III The term “Darwinism” or “Darwinian” merits attention. It refers to “survival of the fittest” or evolution by natural selection, formulations that sound simple enough. But even an elementary explanation adds considerable complexity. Darwinian evolution occurs when inherent qualities appear in individuals that make them better adapted or fitted to their environments by giving them advantage in competing for resources, thus allowing the “fittest” to be “selected” for survival and reproduction, with their advantageous traits then being inherited, developed through further selection, and spread through populations. But each of the elements in that account— variation, environmental influence, competition, selection, reproduction, inheritance, and population change—in itself represents a complex process with multiple components and variables. Furthermore, some distinction exists between Darwin’s “Darwinism” and what scientists, after a century and a half in which his ideas have been adjusted and refined, generally signify by the term today. Scientific progress has addressed uncertainties in Darwin’s own thinking and writing, confusions that contributed to making “Darwinism” far from a totally clear descriptor in the late nineteenth century and lent to the potential for Darwin’s ideas to be misinterpreted. For example, Darwin was uncertain about what causes variations between individual organisms, thinking some scientific law must apply; about how characteristics are inherited; and about what processes other than natural selection might

Evolution and the Uncrucified Jesus 119 contribute to evolution. Evolutionary biologists today understand variation as random, with genes transferring traits across generations, and that natural selection alone is the engine of evolution—although recent developments, especially in the field of epigenetics, have complicated this picture. Another problem Darwin struggled with is whether or not evolution, in some non-relative sense, is progressive, tending toward “higher” species, and this remains a bone of contention among some commentators today. 2 Being products of the late twentieth- or early twenty-fi rst century, neoVictorian novels draw on both post-Darwin understandings of Darwinism and what it meant for Darwin as well as for Victorians including areas of uncertainty and misconception. I generally use “Darwinism” according to the context in question: to today’s evolutionary science, to how Darwin understood his body of thought, or to what the term variously signified for Darwin’s contemporaries. Whether or not they use the term “Darwinism,” neo-Victorian novels dealing with evolution sometimes allow these cognitive fields to overlap in ways difficult and unnecessary to disentangle. But modern science has largely validated Darwin’s overall understanding of evolution, so once the main components of Darwinism are recognized, “evolution by natural selection” often suffices as a defi nition without reference to social or historical context. A few scientists and historians of science suggest avoiding the term altogether because of its potential for confusion in disciplines that aspire to exactitude, while others, as I have done, try to clarify it by distinguishing between Darwin’s and today’s understandings. In writing about The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Tony E. Jackson makes such a distinction by claiming close connections between understandings of Darwinism and contemporaneous forms of novels: “Darwinism has changed since Darwin himself was alive. In the same way that Darwinism embodied the assumptions of the Victorian novel and, conversely, the Victorian novel embodied the Victorian Darwin, so . . . the postmodern or ‘fully absorbed’ Darwin embodies the postmodern novel and . . . the postmodern novel . . . embodies the postmodern Darwin” (222). Recognition of an overlap between postmodernism and today’s scientific understanding of Darwinism clarifies how some neo-Victorian novels handle evolution in fictional Victorian frames of reference, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman is original in its recognition and application of this overlap. I will return to Jackson’s insight later after illustrating Fowles’s tactic of appropriating Christianity by translating its core formulations into an opposing context informed by Darwinism and the abandonment of religious belief. Fowles uses Darwinism primarily in two ways: to comment on characters and their experiences and to forward a view of natural and human reality largely opposed to Christian doctrine and, within limits, amenable to existentialist philosophy.3 Fowles anachronistically applies existentialism to the mid-nineteenth century in keeping with the hybrid quality of neo-Victorian fiction. The subject of Darwinism first arises in the novel

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because Smithson has argued about the subject with his prospective fatherin-law, a wealthy businessman. Not taking the matter seriously, Smithson tells his fiancée, Ernestina Freeman, of her father’s assertion that “he would not let his daughter marry a man who considered his grandfather to be an ape. But I think on reflection he will recall that in my case it was a titled ape” (7). In this way the novel sets up one source of opposition to Darwinism, which many Victorians felt was an insult to human importance and dignity, allowing invidious comparisons between animals and humans based upon skewed application of Darwin’s doctrine of descent with variation. This is an easy attack to understand, since everyone comprehends the concept of descent within family lines. More generally, Smithson’s account reflects application of biological evolution to society and to individual lives, a response that from the fi rst was a standard feature of how Victorians reacted to Darwin’s theory and that the novel repeatedly employs. In The Descent of Man Darwin himself connects biology to society, but many who did so made connections in confused ways. Such is the case in Smithson’s reference to his upper-class status and his anticipated elevation to a baronetcy. Even if aristocracy no longer automatically suggests superior breeding—as a self-made man, Ernestina’s father actually looks down on the upper class—Smithson nevertheless inherits a seemingly almost innate virtue apparent in his speech, manner, and dress. Mr. Freeman recognizes the prestige value of an aristocratic connection, one through which he no doubt can promote himself through Smithson and Ernestina’s children, but with his actual superiority evidenced by his fi nancial self-creation. All this takes on an evolutionary tinge. So too does much else in the novel. For example, a chapter epigraph taken from the Origin, when translated from biological evolution to culture, implies that Smithson’s place in society and lifestyle of money and privilege poorly fit the innate “structures” of his character and capability: “[T]hough each being assuredly is well fitted for its place in nature, many structures have now no very close and direct relations to present habits of life” (Origin 199; qtd. in Fowles 11). This disconnect causes Smithson, reacting against his lack of direction and supported by the supposition he will inherit a title and estate, to propose to an inappropriate person under the illusion that the marriage will reinforce his sense of himself as a superior being. Although he makes light of his family heritage and connections, Smithson applies a gratifying, progressive view of evolution—an attitude common among those who accepted the basic idea of evolution—to his own class-related circumstances, thereby supporting a self-complacency that so far had insulated him from many of life’s potential displeasures, including such relatively minor issues as Freeman’s crude dismissal of Darwinism or his barely disguised disdain for the aristocracy. Up to the point Sarah Woodruff disorders his existence, causing him to recognize his festering dissatisfaction with his life and doubts about his future with Ernestina, Smithson can understand himself as an evolutionary triumph; later he

Evolution and the Uncrucified Jesus 121 becomes a figure of evolutionary failure, in social terms, while Freeman and Smithson’s servant Sam represent the new order and the subversion of Smithson’s class status and of his belief in his independence.4 But early in the novel, walking along the beach and looking at strata in the cliffs surrounding Lyme, Smithson sees only order, not the chaos involved in their sporadic, piecemeal crumbling, and he responds by associating them with the natural orderliness he apprehends in evolution and thereby in his own existence: “inexorable laws (therefore beneficently divine, for who could argue that order was not the highest human good?) very conveniently arranged themselves for the survival of the fittest and best, exemplia gratia Charles Smithson” (49). This quotation broaches the subject of conventional religion to which the novel repeatedly refers, opposing it with a mixed Darwinian and existential nature. Smithson abandoned Christianity at Oxford after a brief period of “dallying with religion” (197), but like many Victorian non-believers he often wraps secular understanding in religious or quasi-religious terms and attitudes while retaining aspects of Christian morality. Fowles provides a footnote “as a reminder that mid-Victorian (unlike modern) agnosticism and atheism were related strictly to theological dogma,” and he quotes George Eliot to that effect (Fowles 47). The narrator’s reference to divinity, beneficence, and “natural orderliness” in particular suggest natural theology; and because he retains belief in a godly, manifest, and reliably arranged natural order, “Charles called himself a Darwinist, and yet he had not really understood Darwin” because Darwinism is not solely about order but about disorder as well (49). One way Darwinism disrupts order is by causing the “collapse of the ladder of nature” (49). The ladder metaphor constructs evolution as progressive, leading upward from lower life forms to humans on the top rung that Charles believes himself to occupy. But the novel asserts that, correctly understood, Darwinism promotes “the Horizontality of Existence” (95), the idea that there are no sound criteria for establishing lower and higher forms of life; Eva Mokry Pohler works out the implications of this idea for the novel’s combination of Darwinism and existentialism. 5 At a moment of particular disillusionment Smithson comes to a negative understanding of that truth: “[E]volution was not vertical, ascending to a perfection, but horizontal. . . . All those painted screens erected by man to shut out reality—history, religion, duty, social position, all were illusions” (206). Unlike the narrator, Smithson never quite recognizes that “horizontality” means that he exists in a web of living interconnections that can as easily signify belonging as estrangement. Neither, despite his unbelief, can his epistemology readily free itself from the trappings of Christianity. The narrator likewise throughout the novel avails himself of Christian ideas and constructs, using them, not to misuse Darwinian concepts as the novel indicates Charles has done, but rather to subvert them by applying them to an evolutionarily informed view of nature in which order and chaos

122 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels coexist. For example, in one of his many informative and tendentious intrusions, the narrator, contrasting the disorderly dynamism of evolution with the systematic and stationary character of nature as traditionally understood by science, slyly connects the stasis inherent in the Linnaean system to the non-divinity of Christ: What [Darwin] had upset was the Linnaean Scala Naturae, the ladder of nature, whose great keystone, as essential to it as the divinity of Christ to theology, was nulla species nova: a new species cannot enter the world. This principle explains the Linnaean obsession with classifying and naming, with fossilizing the existent. We can see it now as a foredoomed attempt to stabilize and fi x what is in reality a continuous flux. (49) Through evolution species come into existence for intelligible reasons, unlike a divine and incarnated Christ—a “species” unknown to nature. Furthermore, self-protective commitment to the religious fi xities of God and Jesus keep the believer from participating in the “continuous flux” of existence where freedom, Fowles insists, alone can be realized. On a number of other occasions, in similar fashion the novel simultaneously deconstructs religion and promotes Darwinian nature in support of an existential outlook. Upon entering the chaotic topography of the Undercliff while looking for fossils, and just before the fi rst of his meetings there with Sarah, Smithson comes upon “an English Garden of Eden” (67): [H]e tried to look seriously around him; but the little slope on which he found himself, the prospect before him, the sounds, the scents, the unalloyed wildness of growth and burgeoning fertility, forced him into anti-science. The ground about him was studded gold and pale yellow with celandines and primroses and banked by the bridal white of densely blossoming sloe; where jubilantly green-tipped elders shaded the mossy banks of the little brook he had drunk from were clusters of moschatel and woodsorrel, most delicate of English spring flowers. Higher up the slope he saw the white heads of anemones, and beyond them deep green drifts of bluebell leaves. A distant woodpecker drummed in the branches of some high trees, and bullfi nches whistled. (68) The slope with its dense vegetation, its “banked” flowers, and its “banks” of a stream” recall Darwin’s “entangled bank,” the description of which begins the fi nal paragraph of the Origin.6 Darwin’s bank—“clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about” (Origin 489)—paints a benign portrait of nature that briefly offsets the picture of randomness, predation, death, and extinction that for many Victorians and later readers dominate the book. Smithson experiences something of the beauty, fruitfulness, and creativity that

Evolution and the Uncrucified Jesus 123 indeed constitute one aspect of Darwin’s nature. Leaving the paradisiacal spot, however, he follows forking and disorienting paths that, suggestive of the historical contingency informing evolutionary change, by chance will lead to Sarah and an unanticipated future. But first “he pushed up through the strands of bramble” that express the disorder and painfulness of the dark side of nature that is the crucible of evolution. Darwinian intimations subtly undermine the idea of the creationist Eden, perfect and unchanging until Man’s disobedience. This undermining is all the more relevant because Smithson, who has been living in a sort of Eden of self-ignorance, self-satisfaction, and limited scope, is about to meet Sarah who will offer him the fruit of knowledge and freedom after he encounters her lying on a ledge above “an ugly tangle of brambles,” a detail pointing both to what Darwin’s tangled bank momentarily elides in the conclusion of the Origin and to the troubles Smithson will face venturing into the unknown. We are to understand that to savor the novel’s “English Garden of Eden,” whose richness and beauty derive more from the narrator’s perceptions than those of the preoccupied protagonist, Smithson would have to abandon his self-deluding scientific dilettantism along with much else that shields him from the disorder and uncertainties of a vital life. To live fully means leaving a mythic paradise for the real world, one that Darwin’s insights help clarify. Smithson, whose experience of seemingly Edenic nature does not preclude an “obscure feeling of malaise, of inappropriateness, of limitation,” recognizes he cannot return to “a Golden Age” and sees no way to escape his circumscribed existence. The narrator comments, “We could not expect him to see what we are only just beginning—and with so much more knowledge and the lessons of existentialist philosophy at our disposal—to realize: that the desire to hold and the desire to enjoy are mutually destructive” (68). He relates Smithson’s inability to the whole of the Victorian culture as if his generalization is less applicable to the second half of the twentieth century because of its access to existentialist writings and perhaps because of the emancipative, counter-cultural impulses of the late ’60s when the novel was written. In any event, what is being suggested is that only by giving up metaphysical certainties and other self-defensive illusions, including the possibility of retaining happiness indefi nitely, can a satisfactory, self-realized life perhaps be secured. Darwinism and existentialism are opposed bodies of thought—especially so regarding the idea of human nature, which the fi rst supports and the second dispenses with—but in varied ways both eschew the ideal and accept that life is change. Only then is beauty truly available, the novel contends. On Smithson’s fi nal trip to the Undercliff, just prior to meeting Sarah there for the last time, Fowles again appropriates the trappings of conventional religion and attaches them to Darwinian nature. Despite being preoccupied with his task, which is to remove the threat Sarah poses for him and his reputation while somehow helping her—she has been fi red by the

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Christian hypocrite Mrs. Poulteney and is without prospects—Smithson is taken with the beauty of the morning: “On the slopes above his path the trunks of the ashes and sycamores, a honey gold in the oblique sunlight, erected their dewy green vaults of young leaves; there was something mysteriously religious about them, but of a religion before religion: a druid balm, a green sweetness over all . . . and such an infi nity of greens, some almost black in the further recesses of the foliage” (239). It is a “religion” of nature, contrary to Christianity, in which “vaults” of living trees replace those of dead cathedrals, but with death hinted at nonetheless by the “black in the further recesses.” A fox momentarily pauses to stare at Smithson, then a deer, establishing him as the alienated one. The narrator recalls “a painting by Pisanello . . . that captures exactly such a moment: St. Hubert in an early Renaissance forest, confronted by birds and beasts . . . all his arrogance dowsed by a sudden drench of Nature’s profoundest secret: the universal parity of existence” (239). Having stripped sanctity from a selfimportant Christian saint and transferred it to nature, the narrator makes a point derived from the Origin: humans have no greater claim to importance than other species, all having emerged as relatives descended through the same evolutionary process from common ancestors. This evolutionary and “ecological” construction was upheld by a few Victorians, including Thomas Hardy, while opposing the conclusion of many Victorian advocates of evolution that humans have progressed to a higher or more significant state than other forms of life. Important is the implication that any understanding of humans, or what it means to be human or a particular human, needs to take account of relationship to other species, although such insight lies largely beyond the purview of existentialism. Later the reader and Smithson are offered another lesson in how abandoning the egoistic “desire to hold” allows fulfillment of “the desire to enjoy” by releasing the potential of the moment. The description of such a moment, indicative of ego-abandonment, elicits another transfer of reverence from conventional religion to Darwinian nature by allowing immersion in its particulars: “Charles felt himself walking through the pages of a bestiary, and one of such beauty, such minute distinctness, that every leaf in it, each small bird, each song it uttered, come from a perfect world. He stopped a moment, so struck was he by this sense of an exquisitely particular universe, in which each was appointed, each unique” (239–40). The culmination of this experience occurs when a “tiny wren perched on top of a bramble not ten feet from him and trilled its violent song. He saw its glittering black eyes, the red and yellow of its song-gaped throat—a midget ball of feathers that yet managed to make itself the Announcing Angel of evolution.” A tiny bird replaces the archangel Gabriel, and instead of announcing the birth of Christ it speaks of wonders wrought by evolution in all forms of life however small. It is “a natural Eucharist” (240), potentially a communion drawing one into nature with its various life forms. But again dark nature is present: the song is “violent,” speaking to the incessant

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competition, the winners and numerous losers, in what the Origin calls “the war of nature.” Once more brambles remind that existence is tough. Mostly, however, this passage evokes wondrous life, encompassing both wholeness and particularity, made all the more wondrous because it represents triumph over death—and, in humans, over the self-serving distractions that separate them from nature. “The bird seemed to announce a far deeper and stranger reality than the pseudo-Linnaean one that Charles had sensed on the beach that earlier morning—perhaps nothing more than a priority of existence over death, of the individual over the species, of ecology over classification.” Nature and evolution being more about life than death is a point Dr. Grogan, Smithson’s fellow “Darwinian,” asserts earlier in the novel regarding the Origin: “This book is about living, Smithson. Not the dead” (161). That individual existences, vibrant in fulfi lling the imperative to survive and reproduce, demonstrate “the priority of existence over death,” or that life triumphantly goes on even if individuals and species die, are positive constructions of Darwinian nature available upon abandoning ego preoccupations; such views of nature’s mystery and majesty, picked up by George Levine in his idea of Darwinian “re-enchantment,” fail to mesh with the “spilt religion” (T. E. Hulme’s phrase) of romanticism, or at least Wordsworthian romanticism, because there is no hint of a spiritual force or capability that links mind to nature. Nevertheless, the power of sensory immersion in the natural world remains. Unfortunately, the ecstatic vision again belongs more to the narrator than to Smithson, who because of Sarah faces death of a false self without, at this point in the story, comprehension of how an authentic one might be realized: “[I]n all ways [he] felt excommunicated. He was shut out, all paradise lost. . . . he could stand here in Eden, but not enjoy it, and only envy the wren its ecstasy” (240). The echo of Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” is unmistakable in this passage that again enlists religious words and conceptions.

IV The crescendo of the novel’s tactic of using religious ideas and motifs to bypass religion and support Darwinian nature and existential freedom occurs immediately following, in quick succession, Smithson’s sexual consummation with Sarah, his disillusionment with her, and her dismissal of him (354–56). He is disillusioned because he learns that she had faked a supposedly incapacitating ankle injury that gained his sympathy and, more shockingly, that she had not previously lost her virginity with the French lieutenant as she had led Smithson to believe. As always, her motives are not entirely clear to him or the reader, but they evidently include awareness that the damaged ankle and apparent helplessness would appeal to his sense of chivalry, and her supposed non-virginity to both his pity about her past and his desire for her as a sexually experienced female—someone

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quite different from Ernestina. Sarah rejects him, she says, because their class difference would cause him harm, and the revealing of her falsehoods makes it likely he will not, in the short term at least, oppose rejection. But there is also the possibility she wishes to offer him the opportunity, once he digests what has occurred, to better understand himself and her as well. Smithson leaves in confusion, his ideals about Sarah and about himself in shambles, and wanders into the night and then into an empty church where he experiences a dark night of the soul from which he emerges free of the conventional religious ideas that, despite his agnosticism, had continued to influence his view of life. In the deserted church, whose “massive Gothic arches of a somber red showed that [it] was very old” (358), Smithson discovers the hold age-old Christian ideas and ideals still have on him now that he faces the greatest moral and emotional trial of his life. Previously, “[b]ecause he had never needed faith, he had quite happily learned to do without it; and his reason, his knowledge of Lyell and Darwin, had told him he was right to do without its dogma” (359). But now in his distress he tries to turn to God, and the narrator weighs in with an observation about Smithson’s experience consistent with that of many Victorians who had given up religion but regretted or mourned its absence—it is, most famously, the speaker’s feeling of nostalgic sadness in Arnold’s “Dover Beach” as he listens to “the long, withdrawing roar” of “The Sea of Faith.” With a degree of exaggeration, Fowles’s stand-in claims that “[i]n all but a very few Victorian atheists . . . and agnostics there was a profound sense of exclusion, of a gift withdrawn” and that, despite all the reasons to reject especially the Anglican Church, “Christ remained, a terrible anomaly in reason. . . . [T]he Victorians lived much closer to that cruelty [of poverty and social ills]; the intelligent and sensitive felt far more personally responsible; and it was thus all the harder, in hard times, to reject the universal symbol of compassion” (359). Whether or not this analysis is correct, Charles is undergoing hard times. First he tries to pray, asking God’s forgiveness for “unchastity,” “dissatisfaction” with himself, and “lack of faith,” but he cannot sustain the effort; he conceives of Sarah’s face as a grieving Madonna and then imagines it in place of Jesus’s on the crucifi x above the altar (358). He looks about, and Fowles suggests that a dead past, including Smithson’s own fossil obsession, will not help his protagonist—that he will have to confront his demons in the present without the religious formulations he has known: “Worn names and dates, last fossil remains of other lives, stared illegibly at him from the gravestones embedded in the floor.” Finally he enters into an internal dialogue “between his better and his worse self—or perhaps between him and that spread-eagled figure in the shadows at the church’s end” (360). What follows are six pages, the bulk of a chapter, in which the voice of Jesus, appropriated by the reasoning faculty and thus no longer an “anomaly,” speaks to and catechizes the hurt and confused part of Smithson’s mind, leading him to a new and more psychologically balanced understanding

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of himself and Sarah and toward freedom from religious and other barriers against reality. Through the exchange he gradually, painfully comes to insights expressed either through the thoughts of “Jesus” or directly in his own responses: that Sarah might love him and is crying over her renunciation; that perhaps she has released him in order to give him the gift of what she wishes for herself, the chance of self-liberation from the fetters of social control; and that Christianity correctly interpreted is about such freedom, not freedom from sin but freedom from societal determinations that cripple the ability to see and think on one’s own. Constructed this way, Christianity is transformed from a religion to a model for existential liberation: In a sudden flash of illumination Charles saw the right purpose of Christianity; it was not to celebrate this barbarous image [of the crucified Christ], not to maintain it on high because there was a useful profit—the redemption of sins—to be derived from so doing, but to bring about a world in which the hanging man could be descended, could be seen not with the rictus of agony on his face, but the smiling peace of a victory brought about by, and in, living men and women. Charles’s epiphany causes him to understand the Victorian age as antithetical to his new vision, which is of emancipation realized through individual selves rather than God: “He seemed as he stood there to see all his age, its tumultuous life, its iron certainties and rigid conventions, its repressed emotion and facetious humor, its cautious science and incautious religion, its corrupt politics and immutable castes, as the great hidden enemy of all his deepest yearnings. . . . it was without love or freedom.” These overstatements, some mixture of the narrator’s language and free indirect discourse, gauge the degree of Smithson’s revulsion with himself as one who has abdicated his will, a mindless cog in a mindless social machine: “[I]t was not human, but a machine. . . . that had brought him to what he was: more an indecision than a reality, more a dream than a man, more a silence than a word, more a bone than an action. And fossils!” (363). Fossils become mere expression of his own fossilization and an insufficient basis for living his life. The solution is wrapped in Christian formulations and their undoing. Smithson is to “uncrucify” himself (362) as he uncrucifies Jesus by freeing both from the cross of misconception imposed from without by inherited theologies, ideologies, and conventions and from within by acceptance of being externally judged and defi ned. In this vein the narrator quotes lines from In Memoriam—“There must be wisdom with great Death; / The dead shall look me thro’ and thro’” (364)—and rejects them as a violation of self-integrity: “Charles’s whole being rose up against those two foul propositions; against the macabre desire to go backwards into the future, mesmerized eyes on one’s dead fathers instead of on one’s unborn sons. It

128 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels was as if his previous belief in the ghostly presence of the past had condemned him, without his ever realizing it, to a life in the grave.” Wisdom is discoverable only in this world and at this time; it is not captive to a dead past or unrealized future. Through these insights Smithson experiences a resurrection from “a life in the grave,” and the narrator likewise coopts religion, changing its significations, by indicating that Charles retains religious faith stripped of what is usually thought of as faith. He “did not leap into atheism” (365), the narrator says, but clearly, by any standard defi nition of “atheism,” he does just that since he now believes in a fully human Jesus representing only the self-liberating and liberated potential in himself and other mortals. Deborah Bowen characterizes Charles’s liberation as “an existential conversion, which follows the traditional pattern of conviction, awakening, and converted life, though the god to whom he prays is a reappropriated Christ”—a figure whom Fowles “in the service of pushing his protagonist toward authentic choice . . . appropriates and redesigns” (381, 373). The novel underscores the significance of Smithson’s psychological transformation by comparing it with a supernatural one. The narrator states that “[t]his is clearly not the moment to bring in a comparison with St. Paul on the road to Damascus” (365), a comparison that apophatically he clearly does make, thus allowing transfer from a life-changing God-given revelation to a self-granted one. But incommensurability between the two kinds of revelations remains, the one historically momentous even if untrue and the other small and personal by comparison, indicating that Smithson’s experience, however transformational, is nevertheless limited. Indeed, it does not divest him of all illusions. For example, his sense of duty, a conventional Victorian virtue the narrator inveighs against on multiple occasions, motivates him to go immediately to Ernestina to break their engagement— the atrocious act of a cad by Victorian standards that he believes he must undertake in the most honest and forthright fashion possible. He must fulfill this duty before he feels himself free to return morally unencumbered to Sarah, whom he has reconceived as loving and worthy of love. But because of following duty rather than his heart she is lost to him; she has left without notice of her destination before he can return. Much of the remaining story consists of his two-year search to find her again without any evidence that Smithson is not again operating under illusions about her nature. Nevertheless, though not free of all real and potential illusions, “[h]e was shriven of established religion for the rest of his life” (367). Consistent with the novel’s pattern of deconstructing religion, the word “shriven” itself is, in effect, shriven of religious meaning. The experience also will free him from a false attachment to science meant primarily to justify his existence and affi rm his self-worth. Dr. Grogan earlier had pointed out, automatically couching his observation in the Calvinist doctrine of predestination—another instance of how thoroughly Christian constructs infuse the language and thinking of everyone—“You believe yourself to belong to a rational and scientific

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elect” (397). After leaving the church, however, he loses interest in science as a pseudo-vocation, no longer conceiving himself special in this regard, much as he no longer sees himself special because of his aristocratic family. “And fossils!” he thinks in the church, appalled by how he had lived, by his lack of adaptation to reality. We hear no more of fossils, for “[p]aleontology no longer interested him” (425). His ambition is to become de-fossilized, or de-crucified, and he believes Sarah essential to this end. Both religion and dilettantish science disappear as distractions and distortions, although the novel itself continues its commitment to Darwinian theory. Smithson now can better face what the future will bring. But his trials are not over and his education not complete. He has yet to face the inadequacy of his ideas about Sarah and, more so, the full and painful meaning of existential freedom.

V Much has been written about The French Lieutenant’s Woman as a postmodern novel. The primary concern in this chapter is the novel’s neoVictorian intermixture of Darwinian evolution and religion, but also its postmodern qualities as they participate in the novel’s handling of that intermixture. Fowles’s existentialism adds yet another element, a neo-Victorian one because of the hybridization of a primarily twentieth-century intellectual position with mid-Victorian experience. Evolutionary science radically differs from postmodernism because it means that numerous qualities in the individual and society arise from biology and thus are innate or partially so rather than simply the products of learning, as the ideology of social constructionism promoted by the poststructuralist strain in postmodernism simplistically claims; in other words, nature operates in tandem with nurture but should not be regarded as negated by it. But Darwinism and postmodernism roughly agree in several overlapping respects. It is true that evolution involves a sort of master narrative, a transhistorical truth of the sort philosophical postmodernism abjures, but that truth is one of change and indeterminacy, of a fluidity and instability that fits well with postmodern rejection of stasis and fi xed positions. And like postmodernism, Darwinism destabilizes binary oppositions—human and animal, culture and nature, present and past. The two bodies of theory also share relativistic orientations to phenomena, one because evolutionary fitness or survival value takes on meaning only in relation to whatever environmental conditions apply, the other because any truth claim is meaningful only relative to its linguistic, cultural, or historical context. Relativism and the collapse of dualistic distinctions reflect a reality in which absolute truth, universal and unchanging, is unknowable. Both tendencies play prominent roles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Its relativism becomes manifest in respect to both postmodern

130 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels and Darwinian applications because of their shared awareness that nothing exists or signifies in isolation and that contexts are multiple and varied. For example, what initially appears as Smithson’s fitness and Sarah’s lack thereof—fitness in this case understood as their ability to function and succeed relative to societal standards—depends on the class and familial situations into which they are born. But although these standards are determinative, they are not absolute; their lives hold the possibility of another sort of fitness, this one more relative to inherent abilities and desires that, loosened from external and inculcated cultural restraints, allow self-development toward uncertain outcomes. This variety of fitness may or may not offer natural or cultural survival value, but it does, in this novel, imply psychological fitness, a wholeness and clarity more likely than not to help in negotiating the external world. Meanwhile, binary destabilizations of what constitutes a novel occur throughout the narrative, overtly confusing ideas of author and narrator, author and character, fact and fiction. It does something similar with the religious and scientific-secular domains— although in this case it operates to offset the one term, as conventionally understood, in favor of the other. The novel also breaks down separation between animal and human, as well as between nature and culture in its application of the processes of biological evolution to its characters’ culturally shaped experiences. Furthermore, the novel demonstrates how the seeming dualities of randomness and determinism intermix, influencing characters’ actions; this occurs, for example, in Smithson and Ernestina’s previously discussed walk on the Cobb and in Smithson’s forays into the Undercliff that lead to Sarah. The intermixture of randomness and determination is evidenced in Fowles’s view of nature. Having said that his “major private interest in life is natural history,” in an article Fowles states that “[b]ehaviorisms in birds, insects and plants have always fascinated me; and especially the components of hazard and mystery that any honest (and even fully scientific) observer must admit they possess” (qtd. in Huffaker 17). Chance, contingency, and indeterminacy are important elements in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. In both Darwinian evolution and postmodernism contingency informs a reality in which truths are often relative and dualities unstable. This entanglement is the focus of Tony E. Jackson’s 1997 essay, “Charles and the Hopeful Monster: Postmodern Evolutionary Theory,” which, beginning with its distinction between Darwin’s Darwinism and the state of evolutionary theory today, explicates Fowles’s use of evolution. Employing the ideas of Stephen Jay Gould, which largely postdate Fowles’s novel, Jackson argues that Sarah represents “a hopeful monster,” meaning a human with unique characteristics who, in the historical and social environment in which he or she appears, is roughly analogous to a novel organism occurring in the natural sphere (226), an idea that Chapter 8 of this book will apply further. Such a plant or animal can be understood as “hopeful” because its uniqueness might allow it successfully to

Evolution and the Uncrucified Jesus 131 compete and survive under the environmental conditions that obtain. But it is in this sense merely “hopeful,” as opposed to confident, because history is contingent, permeated by random events and influences, making the future unpredictable in any but the most general terms; there is in fact a high probability that it will not flourish since genetic mutations are more likely to prove harmful than helpful in any given environment. Jackson argues that Fowles constructs Sarah as a hopeful monster relative to her society, and that the narrator’s refusal to give us a clear idea of her motives, along with her apparent inability to understand her own motivations, reflects her lack of a historical sense analogous to the lack of predictability in evolutionary development (227–28). Although Jackson does not say so, Smithson also qualifies as a hopeful monster because he harbors previously unrealized possibilities that set him apart from most others: not only dissatisfaction with himself and his society, but attraction to the unconventionality and newness of Sarah that will—despite his contrary impulse throughout most of the novel to reduce her mystery to some ideal of femininity—release him, in ways he cannot foresee, to accept the necessity of scripting his own life. This is the existential message of the novel’s fi nal chapter. Famously, Fowles in the fi nal two chapters offers two contrasting conclusions to the novel for the reader to choose between if so inclined, but the second is the more convincing, not just because it comes last but because it adheres to the existentialism that the novel consistently advocates both indirectly and directly through the narrator’s commentary; with these dual conclusions the novel gestures toward postmodern relativism while at the same time adhering to a traditional sense of artistic coherence. Both chapters are necessary, however, because the power of the fi nal chapter stands out through contrast with the former, which also had been a possibility for how things might turn out. “The real point about the multiple endings,” Peter Preston observes, is that “Charles and Sarah might proceed along one or another evolutionary path. They may become ammonites, trapped in the cliffs of Lyme Bay, or they may proceed to fulfi ll their potential as figures from the future, inhabiting a life that may be possible in 1969 but is barely conceivable in 1867” (97). The penultimate chapter offers its version of a conventional romantic ending, a version of fossilization, as Smithson fi nally locates and is accepted by Sarah, who had deceived him only to teach him to recognize their equality and the true worth of each. Smithson concludes that their relationship had been divinely prescribed: “And he comprehended: it had been in God’s hands, in His forgiveness of their sins.” But this recourse to God, sin, and forgiveness contradicts his earlier emancipation from religion, his “de-crucifi xion” in escaping from binding dogma. The fi nal statement of the chapter comments on both the conventional happy ending and the idea that religion can or should shield against life’s trials: “[A] thousand violins cloy very rapidly without percussion” (359, 360).

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Emphasizing the novel’s commitment to existentialism, the fi nal chapter of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, privileged over but not independent of the previous chapter, begins with this defi nition from Martin Gardner that Fowles uses to relate existentialism to the genetic randomness that makes evolution possible: “Evolution is simply the process by which chance (the random mutations in the nucleic acid helix caused by natural radiation) cooperates with natural law to create living forms better and better adapted to survive.” That evolution can so “simply” be encapsulated is doubtful, but this epigraph in company of a second one from Mathew Arnold— “True piety is acting what one knows”—captures Smithson’s experience if, as the narrator suggests, one “substitute[s] ‘humanity’ or ‘authenticity’ for ‘piety’” in keeping with the beliefs of “a modern existentialist” (361, 366–67; emphasis original). The combination of randomness and law helps define the individual’s existential predicament and opportunity within a socially embedded human life. Randomness produces a person’s inherent qualities that can limit freedom if they include pronounced inflexibility or unresponsiveness, especially if such a nature construes newness more in terms of danger than opportunity, thus making self-development unlikely. Moreover, natural and societal forces operate from without, supporting the “determinism and behaviorism” that Fowles recognizes as dangerous applications of Darwinism (120) and contrary to existential philosophy. Therefore for any person, buffeted between chance and determinism, freedom might appear limited or nonexistent. At the same time, however, the newness and novelty promoted by historical contingency, by an unfi xed future, provide opportunities to move into new paths if “acting what one knows” is in fact possible. That people indeed can know truly the circumstances of their existences and freely act upon what they know is Fowles’s existential leap of faith that abandons a religious or metaphysical ground of being and builds on what science teaches about evolution. In the second or conclusive conclusion, after fi nally fi nding Sarah again, being spurned by her as a would-be husband, and then rejecting her offer of a friendship he foresees as damaging to his self-worth and freedom, Smithson leaves her for the unknown in an intensified version of the earlier, already intense disillusionment that took him into the church. In a fi nal translation from the religious domain to that of the secular, evolutionary, and existential, the tactic that pervades the novel, the narrator again rejects God as an option unless “god” can be reconceived as the combination of chance and law revealed by science, and by evolutionary science in particular: “[T]here is no intervening god beyond whatever can be seen, in that way, in the fi rst epigraph to this chapter” (466)—a statement that can also refer to the idea of an omniscient author.7 In terms of the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), who influenced Fowles, Smithson eventually achieves authenticity because he transcends “bad faith”—the “lie to the self” that one can evade the inevitability of freely choosing one’s path and

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the responsibility for what one becomes (Sartre, Being 29, 252). He has tried to escape the burden of freedom by engaging in religiosity, by conforming to social expectations, by identifying with a class and an avocation, and by trying to possess the “Other,” but these attempts all have failed. He fi nally recognizes he is free to choose within a “horizon of possibilities” (Sartre, Being 245, 252) formed in part, according to the novel, by the process of biological evolution but nonetheless allowing development of individual uniqueness. Smithson will not commit suicide by throwing himself in the Thames, we are told, but rather, despite his agony, will choose to build upon the self from which Sarah has helped strip away the adventitious: “He walks towards an imminent, self-given death? I think not; for he has at last found an atom of faith in himself, a true uniqueness, on which to build.” In this experience “[i]t was as if he found himself reborn, though with all his adult faculties and memories. But with a baby’s helplessness—all to be recommenced, all to be learned again!” (467, 465). The novel’s poetic, rhetorically heightened fi nal sentences proclaim that this new life “is to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly into the city’s iron heart, endured. And out again, upon the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea” (467). Without the comfort of religious conceptualizations or even of a science that produces certainties, Smithson faces existential alienation, freedom, and fear in choosing his path across the unfathomable abyss of existence. This alienated, isolated self might seem to evade one implication of the “Announcing Angel of evolution” whose message Charles in his preoccupations had missed: that lives exist in relationship, as do identities unique but also bound up in co-identity with others. But because Charles’s future is open, his rebirth may allow him to heed the Angel’s annunciation of evolutionary potential that helps empower Fowles’s attack on social injustice and leads away from isolation and indeterminacy toward a meaningful ethical existence that Darwinism endorses and that, quite differently, Sartrean existentialism does as well.8 The fi nal phrase of the novel—“upon the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea”—comes from Arnold’s poem “To Marguerite—Continued,” which articulates individuals’ essential isolation from one another whereas “once, they feel we were / Parts of a single continent!” (15–16), like that proclaimed in Donne’s “Meditation XVII.” The French Lieutenant’s Woman asserts a radical isolation necessary for change, but given the novel’s commitment to the genealogical relationship of all species and its attacks on the gender and class biases that separate people, the freedom implicit in accepting alienation should be exercised in overcoming it.

VI In the novels this book has discussed thus far, fossils offer a range of significations relating to geological history, to the particular circumstances of

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characters’ lives, and to the cultures in which they live. For Fowles’s novel they specifically mean being trapped by historical determinates but at the same time, as implicit in Sarah’s gift of tests, they represent potential for liberation—that this world allows free choices that, at their best, rest upon discerning appraisals of society, nature, and one’s own situation. Since the future is largely unpredictable, such choosing does not guarantee satisfaction beyond what can be derived from its own exercise, but it does make its realization more likely. Remarkable Creatures, Ever After, The Bone Hunter, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman all relate the implications of fossils, and of geology more generally, to religion. How does established religion respond to new scientific knowledge that does not fit older beliefs and paradigms? As depicted in Remarkable Creatures, Mary Anning only at times feels discomfited by her discoveries, usually overlooking their potential to disturb in favor of the religious comfort of her Nonconformist background and especially her self-bolstering dedication to a vocation, something Swift’s and Fowles’s protagonists largely lack or are not able to retain. Swift’s character of Mathew Pearce in Ever After loses religious faith entirely and feels compelled to champion his scientific beliefs to the degree that it causes him to abandon his family. Bill Unwin resembles Charles Smithson in that he has little or no religious faith to lose—the condition as far as we can tell of Sarah also—but both men are severely challenged to fi nd or retain belief in the integrity of their own identities, a trust contingent upon securing meaning beyond what either science or religion, or the quasi-religion of romantic love, can supply. Unwin fails and Smithson’s fate is unclear. At the end of the novels Unwin, Pearce, and Smithson, unlike Mary Anning and Sarah Woodruff, are left isolated and troubled, damaged by what they have sacrificed or missed, although Charles unlike the other two—Pearce dies before he can reach the new world—faces an unknown but open future. So too do Captain William Paley Dawkins in The Bone Hunter, Erasmus Wells in The Voyage of the Narwhal, and to a degree Peevay in English Passengers as he works to adapt his Aboriginal heritage to his new hybridized world and to tell his story. The meaning of all of these characters’ lives is bound up in neo-Victorian readings of cultural and natural history, for no identity, real or fictional, exists isolated in a time or place. Through these connections characters seek and sometimes fi nd meaning, if only in recognizing what stands in its way: those beliefs and fears, ironically encouraged by modernity’s celebration of individuality and downplaying of community, that discourage faith in self-potential. These novels all teach this lesson. Certainly The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a highly didactic novel, not only by denouncing injustice or preaching existentialism or enacting it in a character’s experience, but by repeatedly deploying language that replaces notions of the absolute and irreducible with openness to a vast and wondrous universe of possibilities including that of selves unique and

Evolution and the Uncrucified Jesus 135 coherent and ethically grounded; these are lessons it fi nds in Darwinism. A. S. Byatt’s Possession and “Morpho Eugenia” also confront religion with evolutionary science, and the nineteenth century with the twentieth, so that their most fortunate characters can imagine their way to freedom, meaningfulness, and self-authenticity.

6

True Romance A. S. Byatt’s Possession and “Morpho Eugenia”

I A. S. Byatt’s bestselling novel Possession: A Romance, winner of the Booker Prize for 1990, and her novella “Eugenia Morpho,” published in 1992 as part of Angels and Insects, show the impact of science, and of evolutionary biology in particular, upon religion. Some characters unproblematically accept scientific thinking and discoveries while others, committed to Christian tradition but aware of the force of science, become troubled and fall into doubt. In Possession this pattern centers on a written correspondence between two fictional Victorian poets, one a skeptic, the other a believer, but each sensitive to the other’s feelings and point of view. Byatt’s novel employs Darwinian theory, the basis for how science comprehends life, to represent a universe largely uncongenial to conventional religious beliefs, a representation entangled with but not, like The French Lieutenant’s Woman, dominated by postmodern tactics. Possession resembles Fowles’s novel, however, in demonstrating that neither chance nor determinism, both part of the Darwinian vision, precludes freedom, including freedom from domination by societal rules and expectations. But whereas for Fowles conventional religious belief is hostile to freedom and requiring subversion, Byatt presents it sympathetically but as simply inadequate in its beliefs and practices to challenge a modern worldview influenced by scientific discoveries and attitudes. While forsaking Christianity, Byatt’s text, like other neo-Victorian novels concerned with science and religion, commits itself to humanistic values. Despite its overturning of realist and other novelistic conventions, Possession projects an underlying seriousness of purpose by challenging disorder—natural, social, and moral—through its aspiration, like that of any serious art, for coherence and understanding. Part of the novel’s neo-Victorian project is to offset the destabilizing or discouraging aspects of both postmodernism and Darwinism by using their liberating potential as they dispense with religion and promote science tinged by neo-romanticism. “Morpho Eugenia” employs a similar dynamic, as does Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale, briefly described at the end of this chapter. Most of the protagonists in these narratives discover

True Romance 137 in themselves the creative resources for shaping reality into a life-sustaining form of romance.

II Like The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Possession displays literary qualities associated with postmodernism: self-reflexivity, discontinuity, heterogeneity, hybridization, pastiche, and parody. The novel jumps between past and present, self-awarely visiting different discourses and genres, one of which is romance in its broad sense—including but not limited to romantic love—which it introduces into skeptical and disordered postmodern contexts while having fun with it through satiric exaggeration, especially regarding the attitudes and behaviors of its twentieth-century scholarly protagonists as they resist and succumb to it. Nevertheless, as many critics have noticed, Possession largely rejects postmodern theory. It does so in part through its sympathetic use of romance, through both its reworking of standard narrative components—quests, adventures, heroic actions, expressions of idealized love, and wish fulfillments—and, more generally and less playfully, its fostering of a heightened appreciation of life’s possibilities sometimes recognizable even in the everyday or quotidian.1 Linda Hutcheon has argued that the problematizing—rather than the negation or denial—of received truths constitutes one of the operations that most characterizes postmodernism as philosophy or criticism. Partially through its deployment of romance Possession problematizes postmodernism itself. Hutcheon’s ideas are relevant to Byatt’s novel because they explore the engagement of literary postmodernism with history in what she influentially has labeled historiographic metafiction—novels “which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (5). Looking back on the nineteenth century and taking into account the impossibility of completely recovering historical truth, Possession generally fits Hutcheon’s defi nition. It also fits with her belief that historiographic metafiction shows “that history and fiction are themselves historical terms and that their defi nitions and interrelations are historically determined and vary with time” but, nevertheless, that this circumstance does not erase, only complicates, the opposition between fiction and fact (105, 113). Possession presents this sort of complication but, like much postmodern fiction, it is philosophically less radical than postmodern theory itself, even Hutcheon’s relatively mild version. 2 Byatt’s text confronts postmodern relativism and indeterminacy by advocating that some things clearly are truer or more verifiable than others. For example, it endorses, in part through its treatment of evolutionary theory, the ability of scientific and historical investigation to discover or approximate, if not the whole truth, many aspects of it. It also counters what Hutcheon refers to as “Victorian or Darwinian determinism” (45) with that aspect of Darwinism that

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recognizes randomness, contingency, and the unpredictable flow of time that blur categories of knowing and render the future largely unpredictable; this aspect in fact incorporates “the concept of process itself that,” according to Hutcheon, “is at the heart of postmodernism” (xi; emphasis original). The novel nevertheless works to glean the abiding from the transient and the determinate from the indeterminate, aware of obstacles to knowing but affi rmative of such values as freedom, hope, human dignity, and the inherent value of truth seeking—or what Bette Neumeier identifies as the novel’s upholding of “the possibility of getting closer to ‘the real’ which nevertheless remains beyond reach” (“Female” 12).3 Frederick M. Holmes states that the novel evidences “a desire to appropriate, however tentatively and ironically, the humane values of the great tradition of the nineteenth-century novel and to establish, however tenuously, continuity between the present and the past” (333). But its grasp of these qualities is, in my view, more tenacious than tentative or tenuous; it acknowledges problems of knowing and then affi rms, standing out all the more, what can be known. Possession recounts the efforts of present-day literary critics Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey to uncover the details of a previously unknown relationship between the great Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, based especially upon Robert Browning, and an obscure contemporary, fellow poet Christabel LaMotte. The story oscillates between the two time frames. What the modern investigators learn from their obsessive sleuthing not only retrieves the story of a mid-Victorian love affair, which by the end of the novel no longer “remains out of reach,” but fi nally propels them into each other’s arms. That the novel mixes postmodern literary tactics with romance allows Byatt, while adhering to a largely realistic presentation of everyday reality, to explore philosophically fraught interconnections between historical periods, between forms of representation, and between the culturally-linguistically constituted and what exists prior to or independent of it. Kate Mitchell locates the nature and appeal of Possession in its deployment of both “conventional narrative techniques” and an extensive web of intertextuality within “the romance mode as the overarching structure of the novel”; it is through this combination of qualities, which do not “resist, or refuse, representation of the past,” that Byatt is able “to romance her readers.” The novel’s “citational excess,” Mitchell explains, “continually elicits the reader’s desire for the text” and “engages both the intellect and the emotions” in a “detective game” as well as “an endless process of reaching back for additional meanings” (104, 105). I am not convinced that the novel’s intertextuality is quite as fundamental to the pleasure of Byatt’s text as Mitchell makes it, but certainly Possession both intellectually and emotionally involves readers in a process, to a large degree successful, of “reaching back” in an attempt to uncover the truth about the past and its relevance for the present. I also accept the linkage of romance

True Romance 139 and excess, an idea Mitchell ascribes to Diane Elam, who perceives “a relationship between romance and postmodernism [that] comes about as the result of a common excess—the inability to stay within historical and aesthetic boundaries” (Elam 12)—although Elam’s idea of “postmodern romance,” which indeed “resist[s] . . . representation of the past,” would exclude Possession as Mitchell understands it. I wish, with several shifts in emphasis, to draw on these ideas about excess and romance as they operate to reveal rather than disguise or evade truth about history and human experience in general. Excess can be chaotic and overwhelming, destructive to stable and coherent self-identity, or it can be a source of wonderment in allowing involvement in the manifold mysteries of existence while providing scope for humans’ evolutionarily grounded desire to know and, in the process, to overcome self-limitation in experiencing what lies beyond self. Love, the intensely affi rmative and paradoxical mixture of both knowing others and honoring their separateness, is one way in which people escape self-enclosure. Possession enacts romance as a quest to transcend the known within a kind of world that, whatever obstacles must be surmounted to make triumph more triumphant, allows the fulfillment of desire. It is an imaginative and emotional movement from limitation toward plenitude. In Byatt’s novel “pure” science—the curiosity-motivated discovery of truths through reason, intuition, and evidence—participates in this movement, while the religious impulse to transcend physical limitations and achieve emotional certitude is shown, when not simply overlooked, as insufficient. The novel’s romance of form and content acknowledges the reality of chaos, confusion, and limitation but offsets them through the capacity of hearts and minds to discover knowledge, order, and fulfillment in connecting with others and with the natural world. Possession is grounded in reality—nothing is impossible or highly improbable—while making the romantic case that the everyday world is full of remarkable potential. Clearly, Byatt fi nds this potentiality in the nineteenth century. Jackie Buxton says of the novel that it “is in many ways a Victorian novel, for it replicates the realism of its forebears in capturing the nineteenth-century ethos. In another sense, Possession is a nineteenthcentury novel because that is where its real passion—and its author’s passion—lies” (98). Inherent in the novel’s abundance and heterogeneity of materials, this passion, founded on the author’s perception of Victorian historical richness and spilling over into the lives of the novel’s twentiethcentury scholars, comprises an important aspect of the novel’s romance. The wonderment perceived in a distanced reality is found to be present in the here and now, but only insofar as those aspects of modernity antipathetic to romance are surmounted. Sally Shuttleworth writes of Possession, “[t]hrough its density of texture, its depth of engagement with Victorian texts, it operates as an implicit corrective to our fifteen-second culture of photomontages where history . . . is displaced in spatiality” (“Writing” 158).

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Reality and romance come together, an antidote to modern superficiality, in the idea of evolution, which Possession imagines and models as more positive than negative—a way of knowing in which desire promises to outweigh impediments to its realization and in which excess can manifest as order and abundance. It is a reality in which, as Darwin writes at the end of the Origin, “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved” (490). The novel almost immediately alludes to evolution, along with related matters of historicity and representation: in the London Library “works on Evolution had been catalogued under Pre-Adamite Man” (4), a label, as discussed in Chapter 2, showing the influence religion still exercised on science in the nineteenth century. Thereafter the subject of evolution repeatedly surfaces directly and indirectly. For example, like The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the novel evokes Darwin’s entangled bank. It fi rst appears when, looking for clues, Roland and Maud—their names appropriate for a quest romance—visit the home of Sir George Bailey, like Maud a descendant of Christabel LaMotte’s family, and there Roland examines bathroom fi xtures in Sir George’s neo-Gothic mansion: The basin and the lavatory . . . were English and floral and entranced Roland, whose experience had included nothing like them. Both were glazed and fi red over a riotous abundance of English flowers whose tangled and rambling clusters and little intense patches seemed wholly random and natural, with no discernible repeating pattern. In the basin, as he fi lled it, under the hazy surface of the water, lay dogroses, buttercups, poppies and harebells, a bank in reverse, resembling Titania’s if not Charles Darwin’s tangled bank. The lavatory was slightly more formalized than the washbasin—diminishing garlands and scatters nosegays swirled down its cascades over lines of maidenhair ferns. (164) The “if not” construction is suggestive because, in accordance with conventional usage, it indicates that the basin is perhaps even more similar to Darwin’s bank than to Titania’s: if not Darwin’s (as is somewhat more likely), then Titania’s. But the phrase “if not” is flexible, implying that either the fi rst or the second term is the more likely depending upon whether the things compared are of a different or the same order (she’s friendly, if not helpful/he weighs 220 if not 250). Titania’s highly fictive bank might be considered quite distinct from Darwin’s, which illustrates a scientific theory, therefore exemplifying the fi rst sort of “if not” equation stressing the idea of “not Charles Darwin’s,” when in fact it also points toward the second kind of meaning. Darwin’s bank indeed involves a kind of romance, that of a coherent, orderly, and beneficent form of nature— “clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects fl itting about” (Origin 489)—that supports

True Romance 141 a seemingly defi nitive and comforting conclusion to the story of life told by the Origin. Decay and disorder, however, figuratively beset the flowers of Byatt’s toilet that, while initially “more formalized,” “scatter” and “diminish” as they “swirl” toward the drain in a vortex of entropic dissolution. Overall, the description of the bathroom fi xtures hints at ambiguity about what sort of bank is being suggested while maintaining a tension between order and chaos. Titania’s bank is a matter of romance, and so is the washbasin as perceived from Roland’s lower-middle-class point of view; he sees the entire bathroom as “romantic” but suspects that Maud would not (164). The bank envisioned in the Origin also involves romantic enhancement, but it readily can be de/reconstructed in a way consistent with the disorderly and problematic elements of Darwin’s theory: chance, competition, struggle, predation, death, extinction, and the decentering of humanity. The basin captures these elements “in reverse,” through their apparent exclusion, in what appears an obviously constructed benevolent image of nature gesturing toward Darwin’s bank in the Origin as another positive representation of perceived reality—but also, in self-reflexive fashion, toward itself as a verbal representation of visual experience echoing yet another verbal representation of perceived reality. The romance of the sink is also undercut by its status as just one in a temporal series of discarded fi xtures; in a space underneath the eaves “were heaped maybe thirty or forty ewers and wash basins of an earlier day, dotted with crimson rosebuds, festooned with honeysuckle, splattered with huge bouquets of delphiniums and phlox” (163). Therefore a pattern of evolution and extinction—technological and aesthetic but suggestive of biology—underlies the prettiness of the flowers. Although flowers, gardens, and floral design are ubiquitous in Possession, helping support its self-asserted status as a “A Romance,” they also insinuate into the novel a more realistic, rougher view of nature that is overtly suppressed but, on occasion, indirectly suggested—as in the sink and toilet and discarded ceramics—a view of nature espoused by the Origin in tandem with the appearance there of agreeable entangled-bank qualities. Therefore, like the Origin and other of the neo-Victorian novels already discussed in this book, the bathroom entangles two views of nature, bright and dark, a point reinforced by the dream that the washbasin induces in Roland: In his dream he was hopelessly entwined and entangled with an apparent endless twisted rope of bright cloth and running water, decorated with wreaths and garlands and tossed sprays of every kind of flower, real and artificial, embroidered or painted, under which something clutched or evaded, reached out or slid away. . . . The thing smelled dank in his dream and yet also rich and warm, a smell of hay and honey and the promise of summer. Something struggled to get out. (165)

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In combination with some fairly evident psychosexual implications of the dream, which includes an appearance by Roland’s apparently repressive mother, his entanglement suggests a potential collapse of the two sides of binary post-Darwinian nature, grounding flamboyant romance in reality, including the reality of death and whatever repressed fears attach to it. This is romance aware of its grounding in reality. Later in the novel Roland and Maud try to retrace a journey that they suspect, rightly as it turns out, LaMotte and the married Ash surreptitiously had made together to North Yorkshire in the late spring and early summer of 1859—the year the Origin was published and Ash became a Darwinist. On this trip they encounter hedge rows also described in terms of the entangled bank—”here was abundance, here was growth, here were banks of gleaming scented life” the passage concludes—and then they encounter a stretch of vegetation with “clumps of rosy-fi ngered weeds among banks of olive and yellow bladderwrack.” These exuberant banks express the “romance”—the fertility, superabundance, and multifaceted beauty of Darwin’s natural world without its harshness. But along the beach also are “grey and flaking” cliffs—reminiscent of the unstable cliffs of Lyme Regis described in other novels—and “Roland and Maud notice that the flat stones at their bases were threaded and etched with fossil plumes and tubes” (292). Erosion and fossils together introduce disorder and death into the scene, much as they do in The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Remarkable Creatures, rounding it out as a more complete version of Darwin’s nature. Again, romance appears against a background of reality. As in Remarkable Creatures, Ever After, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, fossils in Possession are suggestive in several interrelated ways. They show up frequently in the novel, indicating not only death, extinction, and eras long past, but also a continuity of life in time and space and, most particularly, the influence in the present of ongoing history and its processes—a corrective to the postmodern over-emphasis on historical discontinuity and the cultural construction of past reality. The novel’s multiple references to geologist Charles Lyell, whose work Ash reads during his and LaMotte’s Yorkshire sojourn, augment the point. Lyell’s theory of uniformitarianism asserts that large-scale geological change happens in exceedingly slow, incremental steps wrought through processes still at work in the present; like Darwin, Ash imagines evolutionary transformation occurring in this same manner. The reading of Lyell’s and Darwin’s works, along with Huxley’s, convinces Ash that the past is everywhere alive and that its persistence can be discerned even in the inertness of fossils (233). Subscribing to a neo-romantic and post-Darwinian view of time and nature, Ash notices “the ancient coils of long-dead snail things, or the ferny stone leaves of primitive cycads. . . . If there is a subject that is my own . . . it is the persistent shape-shifting life of things long-dead but not vanished” (279; emphasis original). Ash observes fossilized “ammonites that lay coiled . . . stony forms of life, living forms in stone” (311). Possession is filled with stories

True Romance 143 about resurrections—the tale of Lazarus, for instance, is referenced several times—and the novel’s concern with spiritualism and séances also picks up this interest in how the past with its persistent forms actually and imaginatively inform the present. The novel, however, balances off the persistence of the past with recognition that time also brings continual changes, continual “shape-shifting,” made more apparent than ever by the nineteenth century’s newly developed awareness of the immensity of geological time, which causes what had seemed long-term phenomena, like human history, to appear fleeting in comparison. Ash writes of “rocks, stones, trees, air, water—all so solid and immutable, apparently—and yet shifting and fl owing and fl eeting” (286; emphasis original). He celebrates such change, even though knowledge of it must also bring recognition of the transience of not just individual lives but of humanity itself. Reflecting the character of the novel, the processes of change it observes in nature entangle chaos and order. For example, Roland and Maud examine rocks on a beach, “distinguishing stones for a moment, with their attention, then letting these fall back in the mass-pattern, or random distribution, as new ones replaced them” (292–93). Chance and the emergence of patterns intertwine, influenced not just by nature but by epistemology—by what “their attention” shows them. Byatt’s novel concerns itself with order and chaos in relation to nature and human cognition, and to culture, language, and literary form as well. The novel seems postmodern because it employs pastiche, playfulness, and self-reflexivity in retrieving bits and pieces of the Victorian past, in acknowledging its own status as fictional representation, and in presenting knowledge as indeterminate and truth as relative. But these postmodern tendencies, as well as the novel’s largely realist representations of settings, characters, and actions, are subsumed within a romance structure that challenges the signification of disorder, fragmentation, and incompleteness in postmodern fiction. For example, although the story Roland and Maud recover about Ash’s and LaMotte’s relationship is incomplete, as all knowledge must be, the reader receives information unknown to them that provides consistency and emotional closure to the narrative of the Victorian poets. The most significant of these privileged disclosures comes in the novel’s “postscript,” which gives the Victorian story a defi nitive and largely positive conclusion to supplement what has just been provided, with humorous exaggeration, for the twentieth-century couple and their colleagues as well. Roland and Maud’s story of struggle with emotional reticence climaxes in a loud sexual climax, while other characters join together in other possible if unlikely alliances. In the postscript Ash fi nally meets his and LaMotte’s illegitimate child— who turns out to be Maud’s great-great grandmother—and then, satisfied with the child and her circumstances, departs.4 Mariadele Boccardi says of this episode, “[T]he ‘realistic’ congeries of scattered, incomplete, or unavailable documents that forms the remains of the Victorian poets’ story and provides the clues to the academics’ quest gives way to a third-person,

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omniscient representation of what was not preserved. Thus the past itself exceeds its representational confi nes to reveal its romantic status and provide [in the words of the novel] ‘coherence and closure’” (Boccardi 82). Through this overt disclosing of closure and other structural reinforcements, including its general participation in the genre of romance, the novel suggests there is no reason why art must fastidiously reproduce the disorder of lived experiences, since it, like language, looks to an order more significant to human reality than, for instance, the indeterminate relationship between words premised by the poststructuralist skepticism that had jaundiced Roland’s and Maud’s intellectual and personal careers. The novel’s ultimately conservative position upholds an evolutionary understanding of language, for it is unlikely that it would have developed in the fi rst place, and in such richness and sophistication, had it not been capable of providing a fair approximation of non- or pre-linguistic reality, a capability entailing the survival value of allowing humans to act singly or jointly in accordance with generally accurate assessments about demanding and dangerous environments. It is one way the evolutionary past lives on, even in qualities no longer essential, as when the narrator refers to experiences “that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble” (512). Possession understands language, literature, and evolution as structuring systems in which potential for order inheres within chaos, a relationship that Roland considers in his musing about his and Maud’s research and its relation to postmodernism: Roland thought . . . that he and Maud were being driven by a plot or fate that seemed, at least possibly, to be not their plot or fate but that of those others [Ash and LaMotte]. He tried to extend this aperçu. Might there not . . . be an element of superstitious dread in any self-reflexive, inturned postmodernist mirror-game or plot-coil that recognises that it has got out of hand? That recognises that connections proliferate apparently at random, apparently in response to some ferocious ordering principle . . . driving, to some—to what?—end. Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. “Falling in love,” characteristically, combs the appearances of the world, and of the particular lover’s history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot. Roland was troubled by the idea that the opposite might be true. Finding themselves in a plot, they might suppose it appropriate to behave as though it was that sort of plot. (456) That random and disorderly connections—entanglements—might develop into coherent patterns according to some powerful “ordering principle” meshes with physicists’ recognition that under certain circumstances ordered complexity spontaneously arises out of chaos. This possibility

True Romance 145 frightens Roland, since he might not be in charge of the plotlines that, in response to historical and contemporary variables, emerge to structure his life; indeed, he is butt of a textually self-reflexive joke since he is in fact a fictional character controlled by his author’s plots—although perhaps his story went in directions that his author did not anticipate. At the end of the novel, however, Roland, while influenced by Ash and no doubt other writers, embraces a sense of self-identity that, expressing itself through a newly discovered poetic voice, shapes the disorderly flux of phenomena into linguistic form: “[W]ords came from some well in him, lists of words that arranged themselves into poems” (515). The novel of course does not fully resolve the problem of freedom vs. determination, but it shows that order and chaos exist in mutual tension and that one might exert some control over which is in ascendency and appropriate in a particular situation. Byatt exercises such control in her novel, and she has Roland do the same, but his boss, Blackadder, had failed to make that sort of adjustment: “the apparent chaos and actual order” of his scholarly materials (31) correspond to the excessive order that had stifled his life. A degree of disorder, like that suggested by the entropic floral pattern scattering and diminishing as it swirls down Sir George’s toilet, is an inescapable part of existence and not always an enemy; in the complexity of living, disorder can mean freedom from unproductive old patterns and the welcoming of new and improved ones. Jane Campbell comments, “By showing that her characters . . . fear overly structured repetitive patterns, and by leaving space for indeterminacy and movement, Byatt conveys a sense of hope” (139). As in evolution, even dissolution and death can lead to creativity, change, and renewal, like that following the romance of the climactic storm that hits Ash’s gravesite, heralding the novel’s culminating revelations and resolutions: “In the morning the whole world had a strange new smell. . . . It was the smell of death and destruction and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful” (521). The freedom the novel most endorses is that of celebrating and creatively participating in the dance of chaos and organized complexity that is an intrinsic part of reality. In Ash’s poem “Swammerdam,” the scientist of that name, looking through his microscope at various levels of magnification, observes minute creatures constituting “successive plans and links / Of dizzying order and complexity” (225)—a fair description of the novel itself. These arrangements are “dizzying” in their complexity, veering toward chaos in part because of the limited powers of human observation and conception, but evidencing order for all that. Ash appreciates life in all of its orderly disorder and therefore, in a career of accomplishments growing out of “pregnant chaos” (270), enthusiastically joins in the ongoing flow of both cultural and biological history while forming it into art. Maud and Roland pick up much of his spirit in trying, by the end of the novel, to establish their lives—including the need of each for a considerable degree of independence and creative freedom—through a mutuality that “combs the

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appearances of the world . . . out of the random tangle and into a coherent plot.” Such a plot, including the “[c]oherence and closure [that] are deep human desires,” grows out of needs arising from an entangled evolutionary plot, an interplay of randomness and determination, that informs the story of our species. Although Possession includes traces of dark nature, overall it invokes the benign nature of Darwin’s entangled bank, making, for all its postmodern gestures, a neo-romantic case for the possibility of the mind to behold, if not its own paradise, at least an interconnected world of romance—of plenitude, novelty, interest, and bright possibility. With its complex network of descriptive and narrative parallels, the novel encourages readers to move from entanglement as chaos to entanglement as relatedness, thus both building upon and offsetting its postmodern tendencies. Order, meaning, hope: these qualities, concentrated in the form of romance, stand out all the more because they have been wrested from their fully acknowledged opposites. In this way the novel offers a degree of reassurance in the face of life’s uncertainties; sometimes, but not always, religion can do the same.

III Possession does not support Christianity, but unlike The French Lieutenant’s Woman it recognizes that it can give meaningful structure to the lives of believers through its power to counter or mystify the inevitability of suffering and the finality of death. But in the nineteenth century, even among the devout, belief often struggled with doubt, and science was a major source of doubt. As spiritually corrosive as any specific scientific discipline, scientific thinking in general—through its allegiance to open inquiry, skepticism, rationalism, and reliance upon empirical proof—ate at the roots of Christian doctrine. As presented in the novel, however, imaginative engagement of the creative and holistic possibilities of biological, evolutionary, and earth sciences can more than offset the randomness, relativity, and uncertainty that it, like postmodernism, also entails. Discovered by Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey, the long-lost letters between Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte allude to the pervasive spirit of religious doubt felt by many Victorians. The sincerity with which Ash and LaMotte treat religious uncertainty contributes to what most critics see as a depth and seriousness in their presentation that makes the Roland-Maud relationship seem pallid in comparison. Ash refers to “a creeping mist of spiritual anxiety” caused by “the rigorous questioning . . . of our religious narratives” (emphasis original), and LaMotte identifies “the most subtle and searching questionings and probings of the Grounds of our Belief that in our time have been most persistently and unremittingly explored” through what she calls “The Critical Philosophy” (116, 176; emphasis original).5

True Romance 147 Critical philosophy is a term either for Kantian philosophy or more specifically for its emphasis on subjecting all experience and ways of knowing, including religion and even reason itself, to critical inquiry. Judging from its context, however, the reference here is more specifically to the Higher Criticism, also known as the historical or historical-critical method. Its mostly German practitioners analyzed the Bible in relation to other historical documents in order to understand how and why it developed as expressions of various socio-historical forces, individuals, times, and places. Implicit was rejection of the divine inspiration of the Bible, of its stories of miracles, of its overall coherence, and in general of whatever in the Bible appears far-fetched in light of reason and contradictory to or lacking in historical evidence. Ash says that he owns books by Ludwig Feuerbach (174), a major proponent of the Higher Criticism, whose Essence of Christianity George Eliot translated into English and published in 1854; she had earlier translated The Life of Jesus (1846), David Strauss’s reconstruction of a fully historical and human Jesus. In keeping with Higher Criticism Ash, referring to the story of Jesus’s resurrection of Lazarus, rhetorically asks LaMotte, “[D]id He, the Godman, truly resurrect the dead before Himself triumphing over Death—or was it all only the product, as Feuerbach believes, of human Desire embodying itself in a Tale—?” (184; emphasis original). Along with other books in the same critical spirit, those by Strauss and Feuerbach provoked controversy and sometimes outrage in Britain that reached a crescendo with the appearance of Essays and Reviews in 1860, a few months after the publication of The Origin of Species, creating an equally big stir and for a number of years greatly outselling it. Incorporating the approaches and findings of both Higher Criticism and geological and biological science that cast biblical narratives into doubt, Essays consists of seven contributions by different liberal, or broad-church, figures; critics considered it especially noxious because of its authorship by Anglican clergymen. Ash and LaMotte therefore write in an atmosphere of doubt. LaMotte wants to hold onto her faith—she is noted for writing “religious poems” (36) along with her works based on Breton mythology—while Ash is an agnostic veering toward atheism who, partly in deference to her beliefs, in his letters to her does not express his position directly. Both rewrite myths, perhaps in part as substitutes for Christianity—LaMotte to escape challenges to her beliefs and Ash to express his sympathy for pagan religion. LaMotte says her reading of an Ash poem, his saga based on Norse mythology, produced “quite the worst crisis in the life of my simple religious faith, that I have ever experienced.” The problem is not that it attacks Christianity, but rather that it shares with it such tropes as the “Day of Judgment,” “the mystery of the Resurrection,” and “the New Heaven and the New Earth” that make the New Testament seem just one more compilation of universal mythic materials. “It seemed to me that you made Holy Scripture no more than another Wonder Tale—by dint of such writing, such force of imagining. . . . I doubted and I admitted Doubts I have had to live

148 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels with since” (176; emphasis original). Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies in comparative philology and mythology, which had the effect of making biblical tales seem less special by calling attention to patterns they shared with other ancient writings and narratives, produced another source of doubt. And lingering doubt, more so than outright skepticism, was the great enemy of Victorian religion. Byatt’s effort to delineate and not explain away the complexities of Ash’s and LaMotte’s needs and beliefs within a disruptive historical context constitutes an act of respect for these characters that parallels that with which they regard one another; neither of them is simple or fully knowable. On a lesser scale Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey each adopts a similar willingness to respect the boundaries of the other’s individuality. Lena Steveker focuses on this regard for the separation and integrity of others in Roland and Maud’s attitude toward LaMotte and toward Ash, whom, Steveker says, his biographer Mortimer Cropper “reduce[s] . . . to a stereotype.” Steveker fi nds that the two researchers’ treatment of their Victorian subjects keeps them from being formulated into fully knowable individuals. Thus the revelation of truths about Ash and LaMotte’s story is “left to Maud and Roland,” whose imagining of the poets’ lives represents “an ethical act since it succeeds in respecting the two Victorians in their otherness” (129). Especially impressive is that in order for Maud and Roland to express this respect they must repress their desire, which had driven their researches, to know and take “possession” of their subjects. Again, this is a form of respect that Ash and LaMotte display toward one another as they discuss, for them, the serious and sensitive subject of religion. Feeling responsible for LaMotte’s religious qualms, Ash responds to her concerns with equivocation, a balance between his beliefs, his own uncertainties, and his concern for her. He does not deny his skepticism but disguises it through a slippery use of the idea of religion in which a standard or orthodox understanding of the concept is replaced by that of a romantic capacity to fi nd wonderment in nature or, as he puts the matter in the following passage, in the fascinating mixture of order and disorder he apprehends in all phenomena: I am not become any kind of an Atheist, nor yet positivist, at least, to the extreme religious position of those who make a religion out of Humanity. . . . The impulses to religion might be the need to trust—or the capacity for wonder—and my own religious feelings have always been inspired more by the latter. I find it hard to shift without the Creator—the more we see and understand, the more amazement there is in this strangely interrelated Heap of things—which is not yet disordered. (180; emphasis original) He prefers wonder to trust, and not surprisingly he also champions knowledge over ignorance, though he again performs a sort of balancing act by

True Romance 149 allowing that knowledge—including the knowledge he is suggesting to LaMotte—can carry a price: “I cannot believe . . . that He, the Creator, if he exists, did not make us and our world that which we are. He made us curious, did he not?—he made us questioning—and the Scribe of Genesis did well to locate the source of all our misery in that greed for knowledge which has also been our greatest spur—in some sense—to good” (181; emphasis original). Ash’s involvement in the Higher Criticism comes out in his implication that Genesis stories, despite his attribution of them to a “scribe” or copyist, represent the choices of humans, not dictations from God—it is a human who “locate[d] the source.” He ends his dissertation, which is longer and more complex than indicated by the passages I quote, by advancing the notion that God is not non-existent but merely “withdrawn” in order for humans to exercise their “curious” and “questioning” minds, fi nding truth on their own; with typical diffidence and indirectness, he poses the point as a question while nonetheless signaling what he actually thinks: Now, my great question is, has He withdrawn Himself from our vision so that by diligence of our own matured minds we might find out His Ways—now so far away from us—or have we by sin, or by some necessary thickening of our skins before the new stages of the metamorphosis—have we reached some stage which necessitates our consciousness of our ignorance and distance—and is this necessity health or sickness? (181; emphasis original) The cognates stressed by repetition—“necessary,” “necessitates,” “necessity”—indicate which side of his rhetorical questions he comes down on: in context, the words refer to the idea that humans must progress into maturity, must of necessity transform themselves through their own efforts, rather than relying like children on a father-God withdrawn from us because he is aggrieved by our transgressions, or, more likely, does not exist in the fi rst place. Ultimately Ash replaces the “sin” of human estrangement from God with awareness of our condition and thus the possibility of achieving “health.” His position as expressed in his letters is a radical humanism tinged with romanticism and verging on atheism. LaMotte replies to Ash’s presentation, which is imbued with some of the “ambages and sinuosities” she had earlier ascribed to “the Critical Philosophy” (176), by acknowledging “Doubt, doubt [that] is endemic to our life in this world at this time. . . . we know Things—that make Simple Faith— hard to hold, hard to grasp, hard to wrestle.” But then, almost plaintively, she affi rms her imperiled creed: You write much—of the Creator—whom you do not name Father— save in your Norse analogy. But of the true tale of the son you say wondrous little—and yet that lies at the Centre of our living faith—the

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Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels Life and Death of God made man, our true Friend and Savior, the model of our conduct, and our hope, in his Rising from the Dead, of a future life for all of us, without which the failing and manifest injustice of our earthly span would be an intolerable mockery. . . . could we have conceived that Sublime Model, that Supreme Sacrifi ce—if it were not so? (182; emphasis original)

This is a fair and heartfelt summation of Christian faith—if sin and damnation are left out of the equation—and the novel treats it seriously. For LaMotte, however, the Bible is insufficient, and after she affi rms her faith to Ash, Byatt has her veer into the subject of spiritualism, for which LaMotte has recently developed an enthusiasm; it will become a bone of contention between her and Ash, who considers it nonsense, and a significant plot element as well as the subject of the second novella in Angels and Insects, “The Conjugial Angel.” The important and sad point here, however, is that the faith LaMotte has asserted is not enough in a time of doubt; like others in the nineteenth century who participated in the spiritualism craze, she has to bolster or supplant religion by belief that one can gain evidence of an afterlife, and comfort in this one, by communing with the dead. With Ash’s wife, Ellen, Byatt shows another reaction of a religiously minded individual, one who, like some Victorians, is aware of sources of doubt but not overly concerned about them. She is more troubled, apparently, by those who are troubled. In her journal Ellen Ash regrets the religious anxiety of her confidant, a clergyman with the suggestive name of Mr. Baulk. She acknowledges that they “live in a time which has created a climate of . . . [religious] questioning . . . surely, after all, Herbert Baulk has cause for anxiety. . . . But I should be grateful on earth if [he] could respectfully resolve his intellectual doubts so that our prayers could be full of honest praise and robust faith in a watchful Providence, rather than darkling riddling, as at present” (241; emphasis original). Under her husband’s influence she has read parts of “Lyell’s Principles of Geology . . . and was equally charmed by the intellectual gravity of Lyell’s vision and chilled by his idea of the aeons of inhuman time that went to the making of the earth’s crust—which is still . . . perpetually in process of making. And where may hide what came and loved our clay?” (242–43), the last sentence being a quotation of a line by Robert Browning.6 But she concludes that “I do not—unlike the Reverend Mr Baulk—feel that this newly-perceived ancient state of things impinges on our settled faith in any decisive way,” adding that the literal untruth of the Noah story would not diminish “its message about the universal punishment of sin.” Nevertheless, she admits that “[i]f the exemplary Life and mysteriously joyful Death of that greatest and only truly good Man were to be thought of as inventions that would be differently threatening” (241)—and so draws a line between the Old and New Testaments, the one merely poetically true and the other literally so.

True Romance 151 Ash appears to have no great interest in death, “joyful” or otherwise, including spiritualist communication with departed souls.7 His focus is on life in the broadest sense—humans, organisms in general, and the ongoing life of this planet. Derived from geology, biology, and evolutionary science, his beliefs are similar to those that Fowles’s narrator conveys several times in The French Lieutenant’s Woman: the vastness of the past, nature’s pageant of change and transformation, the interconnectedness of life, its intricacy on all degrees of scale, and the occasional, almost miraculous ascendance of order over chaos in the form of life. Referring to LaMotte’s interest in spiritualism, Ash agrees there are many mysteries in the universe but that they are best confronted through historical knowledge and through science—“through long and patient contemplation of the intricate workings of dead minds and live organisms, through wisdom that looks before and after, through the microscope and the spectroscope and not through the interrogation of earth-obsessed spectres and revenants” (117). From reading Lyell and then Darwin, Ash around 1859 shifts his intellectual and poetic center of attention from “history to natural history” (231), becoming an amateur biologist who industriously collects and studies specimens, especially of marine life living in shallows. The impact of Darwin is evident, as Ash, in a letter to his wife, diffidently confronts the argument from design with his belief in evolution: “It is hard indeed, Ellen, not to imagine that some Intelligence did not design and construct these perfectly lovely and marvellously functioning creatures—and yet it is hard also not to believe the weight of evidence for the Development Theory, for the changes wrought in all things, over unimaginable Time, by the gradual action of ordinary causes” (233; emphasis original). In his analysis of the relationship between science and religion in Possession, Daniel Candel Bormann concludes that the novel “includes passages in which science is seen just to fill the place vacated by religion, and other passages in which science seems to oust religion from its place. These two revisionist moments do not exclude each other; they at times appear together in the novel” (243). My sense of science’s role in the novel, however, differs slightly from Bormann’s. Overall, the two manifestations Bormann identifies not only “appear together” but are subsumed within the romance of science asserted as a positive force that—incorporating the desire for universality, for wholeness, and for meaning that inheres in human nature—is concerned primarily with neither place-filling nor ousting: religion simply falls away as an adequate explanation for phenomena. Bormann also believes of the “two revisionist moments” that they fail “to decisively revise received notions of science in the Victorian period, and in this sense do not add significantly to a revisionist perception of science as a complex historical notion”; this overlooked complexity Bormann identifies as the Victorian “transition from science as part of an undifferentiated knowledge to a progressive differentiation between discourses, a transition which is experienced as violent” (243, 238). Whether or not the transition was fundamentally “violent,” it is

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certainly true that Byatt is driving as much at a psychological as a historical truth—at the reason natural science fascinates Victorians, which has to do not only with the Victorian era but with the combination of human neediness and curiosity that motivates both science and religion and that lingers as religion erodes. Ashe’s scientific activities confi rm him in his vision of biological complexity and unity, in the interrelatedness of all life forms despite their astonishing diversity. Ash’s biographer, Professor Cropper, one of the competitors of Roland and Maud to secure evidence about Ash and LaMotte’s secret affair, writes that Ash discovered “the continuity and interdependence of life,” turning “to universal sympathies with Life, Nature, and the Universe. It was a kind of Romanticism reborn . . . intertwined with the new mechanistic analysis and new optimism not about the individual soul, but about the eternal divine harmony of the universe,” although, “like Tennyson, Ash saw that Nature was red in tooth and claw” (271, 272). That Ash saw a “divine harmony” is hyperbolic—especially when he is aware of the predation and wastefulness rampant in nature—but certainly his attitude toward nature includes a kind of reverence and immersive savoring similar to that of religion or romanticism, a “re-enchantment,” in George Levine’s formulation, connected to evolutionary awareness. His interest in “the origin of life” (276), in the sources of creation—the scientist Swammerdam attracted him as a subject because he was the fi rst to locate the ovaries of the queen bee (227)—also expresses preoccupation with the ultimate. All this can be seen as a kind of substitute religion, but as Cropper says, Ash’s interest was not in souls or some metaphysical difference between ourselves and other species. When Ash states that “[m]etamorphoses [in myths] are our way of showing, in riddles, that we know we are part of the animal world,” LaMotte asks, “You believe there is not essential difference between ourselves and a seal?” Ash responds by pointing to structural similarities between vertebrates, concluding that “We all began as fish.” “And our immortal souls?” she asks. In reply Ash suggests the soul might be another word for intelligence, which can be found in other forms of life (305). Typically, though, he does not assault her with outright professions of non-belief. Ash’s newfound passion for biology, his continued interest in history, and his feeling for the discomfort of those with religious doubts all unite in his poem “Swammerdam,” a dramatic monologue in the voice of the seventeenth-century Dutch biologist and microscopist Jan Swammerdam (1637–80) who discovered new worlds of microorganisms and anatomical details. The poem celebrates the power of scientific investigation and the amazing depths and complexities of nature, but Ash also has his speaker express the manner in which his scientific studies discomfit religious faith; written after Ash begins his epistolary relationship with Christabel LaMotte, the poem seems influenced by his attentiveness to her religious qualms and his responsibility for them. Drawing a parallel between the minute universe he has disclosed and the vast one revealed by the “Great Galileo [who]

True Romance 153 with his optic tube / Displaced this Earth / From apprehension’s Centre,” Swammerdam protests, “It was one step, I say, to displace Man / From the just centre of the sum of things—/ But quite another step to strike at God / Who made us what we are” (228, 229). Ash recognizes that a consequence of scientific investigation has been—in his poem because of early astronomy and microbiology but also, in his own century, because of geology and evolutionary science—to decenter humanity along with biblical evidence of its preeminence in God’s plan. Swammerdam claims that God had “wonderfully made our intellects, / Our tireless quest to know” and then fearfully identifies the paradoxical consequence of knowing: a vision of the cosmos in which people are of no greater intrinsic importance than “all the swarming, all the seething motes” of life he sees through his microscope. The speaker apparently has himself in mind, as well as those who dismissed his work leaving him impoverished and ignored, when at the end of the poem he laments, “Man, poor man, whose ruffled pride / Cannot abide the Infi nite’s questioning / From small as from greatest” (228). It is unclear whether “the Infi nite” is God or just boundless time and space with God nowhere to be found. Ash has little if any belief in the existence of God, but both he and the novel show their awareness of the Victorian climate of doubt and its emotional costs. Romance, which Ash fi nds in studying nature and Byatt uses to structure the novel, cannot replace religion for Christabel LaMotte and the many others who long for its reassurances.

IV Possession represents belief in God and religion as significant matters to which it gives sympathy but not support. Rather, it “problematizes” them—in Linda Hutcheon’s sense of the term—by setting them against not only scholarly biblical criticism but also the disorder, relativism, and indeterminacy inherent both in postmodernism and in Darwinian theory in its aspect of dark nature. Finally, however, postmodernism and the chaotic commingling of life and death that underpins evolution are subjected to the “ordering principle” that, with no apparent need of a spiritual source, also inheres in the evolutionary process that produces the human mind, its capacity for language, its love of narrative, and works of art such as Possession, subtitled A Romance. Byatt’s novella “Morpho Eugenia,” which along with “The Conjugial Angel” comprise Angels and Insects, also is shaped by the romance genre, and I will discuss this aspect of the story before linking it up to the theme of science and religion. William Adamson returns to England from his adventures as a naturalist observing forms of life and collecting specimens in the Amazon—adventures that include living among natives and being shipwrecked, lost at sea, and rescued after many days—and visits the home of Sir Harald Alabaster, a wealthy aristocrat and fellow

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natural history enthusiast with whom he has corresponded. Adamson’s life has entailed the stuff of romance, but in the mansion of Alabaster and his extended family he encounters a different aspect of romance by becoming imprisoned in a sort of enchanted castle. After the jungle and shipwreck, the mansion at fi rst seems a paradise of comfort and sophisticated beauty. And once he falls in love with Alabaster’s beautiful daughter, Eugenia, he agrees to remain in the home for the time being, organizing and cataloguing her father’s extensive and chaotic collections of biological specimens. Eugenia appears delicate and exquisite, like the pair of rare Morpho eugenia moths Adamson collected in the Amazon. Despite being of a lower class and wishing to return to South America to continue his scientific work, he is captivated by Eugenia with her distant, elusive personality that allows him to project onto her his ideals of womanhood, including sexual purity, a prized Victorian quality lacking in the Indian women he had enjoyed. Alabaster, who has democratic tendencies, soon agrees to let Adamson marry his daughter, and he, like Bill Unwin in Swift’s novel, anticipates some form of “ever after.” The narrator poses a rhetorical question: “And so they lived happily ever after? Between the end of the fairy story with its bridal triumph, between the end of the novel, with its hard-won moral vision, lies a placid and peaceful pseudo-eternity of harmony. . . . William, like most human beings, expected this in some quiet corner of his emotions” (69). On the one hand, the narrator’s observations cynically undercut romance expectations—at least those of a reader who has not already picked up hints that all is not right with the Alabasters or is unsuspicious about how easily things have gone in a narrative that is only half over; on the other hand, they anticipate the story’s high-spirited, and only mildly qualified, happy ending. As she does in Possession, here Byatt strikes a middle ground between reality and romance that keeps her exercise in romance from seeming naïve: romance is a powerful literary and psychological construct that can be imposed on reality, even constructively so, as long as awareness of human limitation provides the backdrop. Like Possession, “Morpho Eugenia” overtly participates in the genre it problematizes but does not renounce, so important is the romance narrative to human psychology. But romance requires that its triumph not be cheapened by being easily won. Through four and a half years of marriage Adamson experiences short periods of sexual fulfi llment punctuated by longer ones of enforced celibacy during Eugenia’s quick succession of pregnancies encouraged by her use of wet nurses. He becomes enslaved in his work for Eugenia’s father, his relations with his wife, and his growing family, although the children, cared for by servants, have little interaction with him. In their breeding activities and other respects as well, the Alabasters constitute an elaborate parody of the large, respectable Victorian family, one from which Adamson feels isolated. Thus he encounters unhappiness and frustration—but with the potential for gaining “a hard-won

True Romance 155 moral vision” of the sort the narrator associates with the conclusion of conventional realist novels. The bizarre and most creative aspect of the narrative is its combination of romance with entomology. The Alabaster family is set up like a colony of social insects; for instance, Harald Alabaster’s work room is hexagonal, like a beehive cell, with a ceiling resembling “a honey-comb of smaller hexagons” (14). The obese, virtually non-ambulatory Lady Alabaster spends her days lounging and being fed by, in effect, worker bees; other workers, an army of servants, scuttle about attending to family needs. Having produced ten children thus far, Lady Alabaster, like a queen bee, has pursued eating and breeding as her chief activities; the mansion itself is called Bredely Hall, one of the novel’s many suggestive names. Adamson senses that her “immobile, vacantly amiable presence was a source of power in the household” as servants attend to her wishes (25, 26). After marriage his own wife also becomes largely inert as she turns into another pampered breeder and issuer of commands—of occasional orders for her husband’s sexual attendance in periods between pregnancies. Adamson changes from romance figure into a drone. His salvation comes in the form of the family’s governess, Mattie Crompton, who shares his passion for natural history and entomology. She initiates their joint study of ant colonies, and eventually they publish a successful book of popular science that makes use of their extensive observations. These activities renew Adamson’s interest in life and respect for himself. Finally he learns something that Mattie has hinted at—that his wife has had a long-term sexual relationship with her halfbrother Edgar, an affair that continued throughout Adamson’s marriage and that, judging from their Alabaster-like appearances (71, 73), generated the children he had assumed were his. The discovery of incestuously procreative adultery, like some form of exotically repulsive insect behavior, fi nally liberates him. 8 Abandoning Bredely Hall, he and Mattie sail for South America to continue their work on real insects. Adam-son is like a son of Adam freed from the false paradise that had incapacitated his former self. Such are the outlines of the story. The ultimate romance feature of the novella is Adamson’s release from enchanted servitude, coupled with that of the brilliant Mattie from her quasi-enslavement as a servant, and their excitement in sailing away together for lives of adventure in the jungles of South America. They travel aboard “the strong little ship, Calypso (159). Odysseus was long held in thrall to the goddess of that name, suggestive of a stage of life that allows the Greek hero, or readers of The Odyssey, to recognize what matters: to live life fully without pronounced acquiescence to external and self-imposed restrictions. Odysseus is passionate about returning to his wife, Penelope, which can be accomplished only in the context of mortality and uncertainty, not the easeful eternal life Calypso had offered him. With Mattie’s help Adamson likewise chooses life, intensified

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and made more precious by awareness of its brevity, while exercising free will in rejecting comfort and security and determination by others.9

V The novel’s involvement in what might be called realistic romance ties in to Adamson’s discussions of religion with his benefactor Sir Harald Alabaster, an Anglican priest whose clerical duties are limited to conducting services for his family and servants. Adamson had long since abandoned Christianity in what he sees as a liberation from the grotesqueries of the hell-fi re religion to which his father, a Methodist minister, had subjected him (9, 23, 34, 35, 90). But because of Adamson’s skepticism and commitment to Darwinian theory, Alabaster fi nds him a worthwhile disputant with whom to work out his own religious and scientific views. Sir Harald projects a book he is trying to write as a defi nitive defense of Christian doctrine, not by rejecting scientific thinking and discoveries, but rather by acknowledging them and then showing that they do not preclude faith in the Christian God. He claims to reject unconvincing efforts to prove biblical truth and God’s existence by ignoring materialist explanations that sufficiently account for natural phenomena, and he rejects putting humans at “the centre of things” through fallacious reasoning, or by creating “God in our own image” (57)—although in speech and writing he ends up doing precisely these things. In his journal Adamson, discussing his plan to return to the Amazon to continue his scientific work, refers to the “rational plan I had made for my life—the romantic plan no less, which now coincides with the rational” (13). Alabaster seeks a similar kind of synthesis in his attempt to rationally support a romantic view of Christianity—one dominated by a loving and benevolent God who authored a beneficent Creation in which His caressing imprint can be discerned everywhere. Alabaster’s sermons “bore no relation at all to the threats and ecstasy of the religion [Adamson] had grown up in, the red caverns of eternal fi re, the red floods of spilt sacrificial blood. Their note was kindly, their subject matter love, family love . . . the love of God the Father, who watched the fall of every sparrow with infi nite care” and who promoted the human family as the center of and model for kindly relationships between “all living beings, wondrously made” (23). But because of his acknowledgement of objections to such a view, scientific and otherwise, Sir Harald’s sincerity is painfully challenged—and would be more so if he knew of the kind of family love being practiced by his son and daughter. His efforts lead him into circular, convoluted, and hackneyed arguments and to continual frustration as he attempts to prove the unprovable. Alabaster feels he must accept Darwin’s work, allowing that “[i]f I were a young man now . . . I would be compelled towards atheistic materialism

True Romance 157 by the sheer beauty, the intricacy of the arguments of Mr Darwin, and not only Mr Darwin,” and he claims to no longer fi nd conclusive Paley’s version of the argument from design, for “now we have a powerful, almost entirely satisfactory explanation—in the gradual action of Natural Selection. . . . And any argument that would truly seek to fi nd an intelligent Creator in his works must take account of the beauty and force of these explanations . . . nor try to refute them for the sake of defending Him who cannot be defended by weak and partial reasonings” (33; emphasis original). The clergyman’s challenge is to show why evolutionary theory is not “entirely satisfactory” through arguments that are not “weak and partial”; he wishes to admit difficulties and then surmount them through the exercise of reason. He characterizes his endeavor as the “kind of impossible book everyone now is trying to write. A book which shall demonstrate—with some kind of intellectual respectability—that it is not impossible that the world is the work of a Creator, a Designer” (33). His doubts about his project consistently appear in hedging constructions such as “kind of impossible book,” “some kind of,” and “not impossible.” Many writers in the preOrigin nineteenth century pursued the goal of accommodating science and religion, especially in regard to geology and Genesis; the evolutionary theories of Chambers and Darwin added new motivations and complexities to reconciliation efforts. An example of Sir Harald’s approach of admitting difficulties and then misrepresenting or forgetting them is his acknowledgement of “the wastefulness of Nature which so appalls the Laureate”—a reference to Tennyson’s In Memoriam—and of Darwin’s own occasional lament that “Nature herself was cruel and wasteful” (85).10 But then Alabaster uses social insects to try to prove that such is not the case, anthropomorphically sloughing off the apparently instinctual, amoral mindlessness with which they destroy whatever threatens their collective goals: “I do not think it is folly to argue that the society of the bees has developed in the patient nuns who do the work a primitive form of altruism, self-sacrifice, or loving-kindness. The same is even more strikingly true of the sisterhood of ant-workers who greet each other with great shows of affection and gentle caresses” (86). The phrase “I do not think it is folly” expresses the characteristic lack of confidence with which he advances positions he himself fi nds dubious. For Adamson there is no doubt that nature is by human standards both beautiful and cruel, and that this combination can engender a sense of awesomeness in lieu of that promoted by religion. Despite his stated reservations about Paley, Alabaster accepts much the same argument from design—as Adamson himself had done as a young man (10)—including the psychological design of humans in which “the idea of the Creator is as natural to man as his instincts.” But this assertion leads him to admit that he is “in a great puzzle about the relations between instinct and intelligence in all creatures” (34). His response to this perplexity is a mere assertion that there must be “a Divine Intelligence as source

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of all our lesser ones” and that we do not, as “has been better and better argued of late . . . make God in our image, because we cannot do otherwise. I cannot believe that Mr Adamson. I cannot. It opens the path to a dark pit of horrors.” Citing Feuerbach, Adamson contends that God might well be a human creation, that we “invent a divine parent” because “[w]e need loving kindness in reality; and often we do not fi nd it” (89; emphasis original). In general he counters the disturbed priest with the Higher Criticism, his own study of nature, and evidence from Darwin. Alabaster, however, misrepresents Darwin, for example regarding the explanation given by the Origin for the evolutionary development of the eye, one of Darwin’s most detailed and impressive demonstrations of design without a designer (“Morpho” 36).11 Along with the argument from design, Sir Harald advances two other analogically fallacious lines of thought that beg the question of God’s existence: “the argument from beauty” and the “argument from love,” which assume that the human capacity for apprehending beauty and experiencing love must have come from a God with these same capacities. Adamson responds by pointing to Darwinian sexual selection as the source of beauty and to the application of human qualities to God as the source of divine love (58, 89).12 What all this amounts to is Byatt’s awareness of how profoundly some well-informed, conscientious Victorians suffered a kind of hell, “a dark pit of horrors,” because of divided allegiance to reason and faith, to science that seemed antithetical to the religious beliefs they cherished. Adamson escaped this quandary, although in consequence he, as actually happened to some Victorian apostates, was disowned by his father (35). But Alabaster cannot evade an anguish that preoccupies his life and takes him away from involvement with his family, even though he understands family as the basis for God’s relationship with his creations; ironically, partly because of his debilitating and endless deliberations about his faith, he does not fulfi ll very well the role of the caring and fully engaged father-god he cherishes. Sir Harald’s efforts to prove his beliefs end in anguished cries from the heart in which he all but admits the hopelessness of thinking his way back to God. He remembers the magic of his childhood beliefs, for he is “old enough to have believed without question in the Divine Birth on a cold night with the sky full of singing angels and the shepherds staring up in wonder, and the strange kings advancing across the sand on camels with gifts” (emphasis original). But a new worldview driven by science has ruined the romance of Christianity and left him feeling antiquated and worthless: Now I am presented with a world in which we are what we are because of the mutations of soft jelly and calceous bone matter through unimaginable millennia—a world in which angels and devils do not battle in the Heavens for virtue and vice, but in which we eat and are eaten and absorbed into other flesh and blood. All the music and painting, all the poetry and power is so much illusion. I shall moulder like a mushroom

True Romance 159 when my time comes, which is not long. It is likely that the injunction to love each other is no more than the prudent instinct of sociability, of parental protectiveness, in a creature related to a great ape. Darwinian evolution occupies the center of Alabaster’s loss, which he says he “cannot measure . . . it is the pit of despair itself” (59, 60). Is it possible for the modern reader to sympathize with a Victorian character whose science-induced religious doubts produce hell on earth? Byatt’s neo-Victorian novella works to create such sympathy. Adamson feels it: “[T]he more he delighted in his own observations of its [nature’s] gradual workings the more vain and pathetic he felt Harald’s attempts to throw a net of theology over it,” but he possesses “enough human kindness” not to pursue Alabaster with “all he truly thought” and “cast his patron and father-in-law into complete despair” (73). Alabaster’s situation must have become even worse when his son-in-law and putative father of his grandchildren, a man he apparently genuinely cares for, abruptly abandons Bredely Hall, doing so without explanation so as not to devastate him and others with the revelation of incest and adultery. But the novel leaves Sir Harald and his problems behind as Adamson and Mattie Compton venture upon new lives. When Mattie announces that the Calypso has “two berths free,” we are to understand that the two colleagues, about to become lovers, will undergo “two births,” or rebirths, the essence of which is becoming “free” of illusions and self-imposed limitations and savoring the individuality that emerges. They do not, like Harald Alabaster, need existence to appear kindly, for both fully recognize “nature red in tooth and claw,” the famous phrase Adamson quotes (59) to sum up what he knows particularly well, and alludes to numerous times, because of studying insects and living in tropical jungles.13 Nor do they expect their personal lives to be easy: Adamson says they “will look back on this [life at the Alabaster estate] as a Paradise of comfort,” and the narrator agrees (158). Nevertheless, in this narrative that often alludes to insect metamorphoses, the two protagonists have transformed themselves into adventurers like the monarch butterfly, far from land, that despite its fragility finds its way to the Calypso; a drawing of the insect concludes the novella. The couple “breathe salt air, and hope, and their blood swims with excitement of the future”; and the orchestrating author-narrator, choosing a happy ending qualified by awareness that this could be the high point in her characters’ lives, announces “this is a good place to leave them, on a crest of a wave, between the ordered green fields and hedgerows, and the coiling, striving mass of forest along the Amazon shore” (160). Like all of us, William Adamson and Mattie Compton exist between culture and nature, each with its bright and dark aspects, its entanglement of order and chaos, its affi nities to life and to death. The two characters acknowledge both life and death, but the opportunities and uncertainties of life are what they embrace. The

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novella suggests it is a matter of will and epistemology, of what one chooses to notice, but also of choosing correctly. The captain of the Calypso says, “That is the main thing. . . . To be alive. As long as you are alive, everything is surprising, rightly seen” (160).14 This is the “hard-won moral vision” the narrator ascribes to the conclusions of conventional novels (69)—“moral” in this case because truly savoring life includes prizing it in everything that exists in all its expectedness and unpredictability, its interrelatedness and individuality, its triumphs and defeats. In enacting this vision “Morpho Eugenia” and Possession abandon religion and embrace the romance of the real, allowing most of their protagonists, through their own choices, to assume fulfi lling identities.15

VI The Biographer’s Tale resembles Possession and “Eugenia Morpho” in several respects. First, like Possession, it is a pastiche: the notebook of a would-be biographer, Phineas G. Nanson, which incorporates his research activities and the many generally fragmentary and unreliable documents he uncovers, gradually turns into his autobiography as he fi nds his life, in response to the unexpected ways in which his inconclusive researches play out, more interesting and more conclusive than his biographical materials. Second, again like Possession, the novel—art commenting on itself— weaves chaotic, puzzling strands of reality and of the past into order and romance in the present. Similar to the experience of Roland Mitchell and Maude Bailey, Nanson abandons poststructuralism and postmodern indeterminacies—he had been a graduate student of literature—to accept, despite limitations on knowing, what reality can mean in support of satisfactory lives and self-identities. Like Mitchell, he realizes the creative, unifying power of forming words into patterns. Third, as in the experiences of Henry Ash, William Adamson, and Mattie Crompton, The Biographer’s Tale conveys fascination with biological nature. Under the influence of a Swedish entomologist named Fulla, a woman powerful in body, mind, and personality, Nanson takes up scientific research on beetles that allows him to appreciate not only concrete reality for its own sake but the process of discovery, including self-discovery, in his growing fascination with nature’s ways. Like “Eugenia Morpho” with its ant colonies, the novel celebrates the interconnectedness of all life and the observer’s ability to participate. The Biographer’s Tale articulates ecological attitudes implicit in a number of other neo-Victorian novels. An expert on bees, Fulla is aware of the complex interrelationships of all life forms—she sees “the interdependence of things” and, as an environmentalist aware of the dangers of human interference with this intricate interdependence, tells “[t]ales of the destruction of . . . habitats by humans, and of benign and necessary insects,

True Romance 161 birds, bats and other creatures, by crop-spraying and road building” (142, 281). She denounces ecotourism with its effect of “[f]urther unbalancing and disturbing the disturbed Galápagos.” “We are,” she says, “an animal that needs to use its intelligence to mitigate the effects of its intelligence on the other creatures” (282, 238). Her influence on Nanson, including her positive effects on his sexuality and self-image, is to fashion what could be called his psychological ecology. Through Fulla he discovers wonderment in nature and his own nature, a process that ends in an “epiphany” he says he will “write . . . down, for pleasure, cliché and all . . .” (191). In London’s Richmond Park, where he has been collecting information on stag beetles and the behavior of their sexually competing males, he sees a flock of parrots that, while seeming “a hallucination. . . . were dropping real guano.” He describes the exotic colors and forms of the birds and says he “was . . . deeply moved, by this manifestation of the tropics in English oaks. The English sunset caught their feathers in a way the dying light where they originated could never quite have done.” The birds turn out to be feral parakeets, but that does not detract from the “order and wonder” and the “beauty” he fi nds, or creates, in his “vision” (294) despite the birds’ possible representation of the human unbalancing of nature that Fulla abjures, and despite “real guano.” Nanson’s vision forms his study of stag beetles and his observation of flowers into a profound sense of nature, irreducible to mere knowledge, in which strife mixes with beauty and the general with the particular. He is left with an image of “the pink hook of strong beaks, horns and claws, stamens and pistils, the beat of demonic wing-cases, and descending circles of brilliant rose and emerald wings” (294–95). In the fi nal paragraph of the novel Nanson sums up this wisdom, which, judging from her three texts, is Byatt’s as well. In his newfound identity as a writer and maker of meaning, he expresses the enchantment he finds both in the natural world and in Fulla: “As long as we don’t destroy and diminish it irrevocably, the too-much-loved earth will always exceed our power to describe, or imagine, or understand it. It is all we have. I have to stop writing now—I can see Fulla. . . . Here she comes, with that amazing wing of crinkled hair, like an electric pulse, like a swarm, like an independent creature” (301). As he has done in relinquishing the study of literature, Nanson gives up studying past lives: unlike the rest of the novel, the fi nal paragraph is in the present tense. Without postmodernist complexities and willingness to look at ugliness as well as beauty, the view of nature captured in Byatt’s three stories might seem naïve, the product of simplistic romanticism or romance forms inadequate for representing the modern world. Like most of the novels studied in this book they earn their visions; characters make choices, good and bad, and from them the fortunate ones learn to transcend their fears and selflimitations and involve themselves in a wider world of natural and human interrelationships. Like The Origin of Species, most of these texts end with

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heightened and even rhapsodic renderings of nature. Mr. Darwin’s Shooter and Ark Baby, the foci of next two chapters, conclude in this celebratory way after narratives that, through crises of faith caused particularly by evolutionary theory, connect natural science to the development of coherent and assured self-identities.

7

Devil’s Chaplain This Thing of Darkness and Mr. Darwin’s Shooter

I In Harry Thompson’s This Thing of Darkness and Roger McDonald’s Mr. Darwin’s Shooter Charles Darwin’s science introduces cracks into the bedrock of their protagonists’ fundamentalist religious faith. Because of the development of evolutionary theory Darwin troubles the lives of main characters Robert FitzRoy and Syms Covington. These historical figures, who would be largely forgotten today if not for their connection with Darwin, worked and lived closely with him during the famous Beagle voyage. FitzRoy was an aristocrat who, at the time of the journey, seemed destined for a brilliant career, while Covington came from a poor lower-class background and had little prospect for advancement. FitzRoy commanded a ship and Covington was a cabin boy and then Darwin’s servant. As presented respectively in the two novels, however, the two characters share a love for the Bible and belief in its literal truth. At the beginning of the trip Darwin also was a believer, but biological and geological insights gleaned during the voyage began to undermine his faith. He felt little pain in this process, which continued after his return to England, but the novels show his awakening scientifi c understanding already having an unsettling effect on his two associates. Furthermore, the publication of The Origin of Species, over twenty years after Darwin’s return to England, was a profound aff ront to the religion of the historical FitzRoy as it is to that of the fictionalized versions of both FitzRoy and Covington. Knowing how disturbing many would fi nd his view of nature, in an 1856 letter to a colleague Darwin intimated, with distress, his role as “a Devil’s chaplain” (Correspondence: 6: 178; see also 8: 224). Darwin’s phrase captures his effect on the two protagonists. This chapter shows how simmering crises of faith provoked by Darwin disturb the lives and self-identities of these characters, although differences in their fortunes and temperaments fi nally allow Covington, unlike FitzRoy, to accommodate the word of God with what Darwin had wrought.

164 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels II Darwin appears prominently in Jenny Diski’s Monkey’s Uncle and very briefly in Liz Jensen’s Ark Baby, although in both his influence is felt throughout. Those novels are the subject of the next chapter. Darwin is also an important background presence in Nicholas Drayson’s Confessing a Murder, which I will discuss in the concluding chapter. The Origin (1980) by Irving Stone, who was one of the pioneers of the biographical novel, is less creative with its neo-Victorianism than are those two novels or Thompson’s and McDonald’s, but it is significant as the fi rst fully novelistic treatment of Darwin. It handles Darwin’s life in a chronologically straightforward manner, incorporating elements of the scientist’s writings and of those who have written about him. Darwin emerges as genial, decent, and self-effacing despite his great ambition to contribute to scientific knowledge and in the face of the bad health that afflicted him for most of his life; this is pretty much the standard interpretation of the man. The novel treats the clash of science and religion in a relatively brief fashion, and it is clear that although the issue is interesting and often painful for many Victorians, it is a relatively minor one for Darwin except insofar as it influences others, especially those he cares for—his Christian wife in particular— and those likely to attack him on religious grounds; this fits with what is known about the subject and with Darwin’s autobiographical discussion of religion and his religious unbelief (Autobiography 85–96). In the Origin Darwin is a hero. In Harry Thompson’s novel he plays a much different and more problematic role. This Thing of Darkness tells the story of Captain Robert FitzRoy, on whose second surveying voyage to South America the young Darwin served as ship’s naturalist and gentleman companion to the Captain. This epic voyage lasted nearly five years, eventually circling the world, and the physical and experiential materials Darwin collected allowed him to publish scientific papers as well as his popular Journal of Researches (1839), written for a broad audience; these publications made him famous long before the Origin of Species. Even apart from Darwin, FitzRoy deserves to be remembered for his great capabilities as a captain, his impressive success in mapping coastlines, and his important contributions as a founder of meteorology and weather forecasting. Susceptible to episodes of mental disturbance and depression, FitzRoy during the voyage relied on Darwin, likewise well educated and from a wealthy family, as a hedge against emotional isolation. In many renderings, including Darwin’s Autobiography (72–76), which influences later accounts, FitzRoy comes across simply as a gifted but difficult personality. Thompson makes him into something akin to a tragic hero. The title of This Thing of Darkness most immediately refers to FitzRoy’s bouts with mental distress—it records several of these but also the Captain’s continual fear that they will recur—and to Shakespeare’s The Tempest,

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where Prospero applies the phrase to the man-monster Caliban. The novel associates Caliban with the natives of Tierra del Fuego, since they also were often seen as monstrous, though not by FitzRoy, who is greatly concerned for their spiritual and material welfare. This is an important aspect of the story because of his doomed project, begun during his fi rst Beagle voyage, to bring three young Fuegians to England; educate them there in English language, culture, and religion; and then, on a second voyage, return them to Tierra del Fuego so that they, with missionary help, could begin converting other Indians to civilized ways. Diski’s Monkey’s Uncle incorporates the same story in which FitzRoy believes God has chosen him for this mission. This Thing of Darkness portrays the Captain as not only brilliant and intrepid in the fulfillment of his duties despite deeply formidable obstacles, but also deeply humane. The novel diminishes Darwin, however, perhaps through contrast to enhance FitzRoy. The young scientist at times is petty, peevish, timid, self-serving, and preoccupied with his success and fame. Back in England, he behaves as a name-dropping egotist because of important new acquaintances acquired through his scientific successes stemming from the Beagle voyage; he also, to FitzRoy’s disgust, shows ingratitude toward those who had helped him during the trip (442–45, 449–50). Moreover, although the novel does not use the phrase—it was not coined until the late nineteenth century—Darwin is an outright social Darwinist; he is sanguine about the disappearance of indigenous peoples and convinced of the superiority of his nation, class, and race as validated by their domination of others (220, 321–22, 446, 451). FitzRoy however is, within the limits set by his religion, sensitive to the native people he encounters: Fuegians, Tahitians, and Maoris. Thompson’s Darwin rarely shows such humanity. He is not invariably distasteful, but the novel clearly moves in the opposite direction of hagiography. The author primarily blames Darwin’s character flaws for the end of his and FitzRoy’s friendship. Like all of the novels this book examines, This Thing of Darkness is a novel of ideas, and these, as already noted, center around a clash between FitzRoy’s biblical literalism and Darwin’s growing skepticism based on his scientific fi ndings. Apparently in order to strengthen this aspect of his novel, Thompson departs from the historical record by, fi rst, having Darwin become an evolutionist during the Beagle voyage itself rather than only after his return to England and second, once returned, having him disclose to FitzRoy his theory of evolution based on natural selection (446–49). This last is unlikely because Darwin, aware of their potential to disturb people and provoke attacks against him, for nearly twenty years kept his evolutionary ideas a closely held secret. But his disclosure to FitzRoy allows their controversies to resume in England, with a fictitious climactic scene between them, taking place many years later, occasioned by the notion that Darwin had promised FitzRoy never to publicize his evolutionary theory and therefore seeks release from his pledge so he can publish the Origin (435, 559).

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During the Beagle voyage itself the two men, still friends, sometimes convivially and sometimes hotly debate a range of issues; in their disputations FitzRoy, who is intelligent, articulate, and scientifically well informed, comes off equal to if not better than Darwin. One area of controversy is Noah’s flood, which FitzRoy wishes to accommodate to geological evidence that Darwin increasingly sees as contradicting the story. Also on a biblical basis, but aided by his ability to cite scientific counter evidence, FitzRoy opposes Darwin’s growing commitment to the theory of evolution—or transmutation as the idea was called at the time—that the novel anachronistically attributes to Darwin during the voyage. With the Bible in mind, FitzRoy on various occasions contends that the world is only some thousands of years old, that no new species ever appear, and that one cannot change into another. Instead, he strengthens his commitment to Genesis with natural theology and the argument from design: “I am not frightened by transmutation—I am intellectually, morally and aesthetically repelled by it. Nature is not a progression. No creature is any more or less perfect than its fellows in the eyes of the Lord. Every creature is adapted to the condition and locality for which it is designed” (443). Similar to what he does in backdating Darwin’s views to the Beagle voyage, Thompson assigns to FitzRoy, during the voyage and shortly thereafter, not just beliefs he is known to have held at the time but those he advocated later. In FitzRoy and Darwin’s dialogues This Thing of Darkness condenses many years of nineteenth-century controversy over geology and evolution, doing so in considerable detail and in relation to the complicated personalities and belief structures of two characters whose ideas are bound up in their efforts to secure admirable identities and reputations. Closely related to how they understand and feel about themselves, there are also strong ethical bases to the men’s positions: FitzRoy indeed fears evolutionary theory as both socially damaging and an endangerment to individual souls, whereas for Darwin the ascertaining and telling of scientific truth constitutes the great moral imperative, though one closely involved with ego. Darwin’s telling of scientific truth makes him, for FitzRoy, “this thing of darkness”—the devil’s chaplain.

III Like The Origin and This Thing of Darkness, Roger McDonald’s Mr. Darwin’s Shooter, winner of four Australian literary awards, gives much attention to the voyage of the Beagle; in his autobiography Darwin says it was “by far the most important event in my life and . . . determined my whole career” (76). Thompson’s and McDonald’s novels share particular concern about the scientific and religious puzzles and problems the journey elicited. Mr. Darwin’s Shooter differs from Stone’s and Thompson’s depictions of Darwin, however, falling somewhere between their characterizations: he is not unlikeable, but he is remote and preoccupied with

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his work. Mr. Darwin’s Shooter also differs from the other two novels by more clearly fitting the neo-Victorian model of re-imagining the nineteenth century—of imposing a new perspective on what has been known or generally believed true about its history. One way it accomplishes this is by telling the story of a man, Darwin’s “shooter,” about whom very little is known despite his close association with Darwin during the Beagle years and later in London when the scientist was forming evidence, gathered during the voyage and afterward, into his evolutionary theory. Arguably this individual was for many years the only person besides Darwin aware of his ideas and where they were tending. That such was the case becomes the intellectual and dramatic basis of the novel and another iteration of the science-religion theme that runs through this study of neo-Victorian novels. Not only does McDonald’s novel flesh out a largely forgotten life, but in other ways as well it creatively renders the past in light of present-day attitudes and understandings. The bulk of this chapter is about McDonald’s novel and its fictionalized amplifications of a historically marginal figure. The novel also powerfully captures the allure of an unsophisticated religion based on Christian fellowship and love of the Bible. More than any other neo-Victorian narrative Mr. Darwin’s Shooter dramatizes the effect of Darwin’s ideas on an individual’s religious belief. It takes as its subject the real-life figure of Syms Covington, who throughout most of the Beagle voyage and for two years afterward in London assisted Darwin as personal servant, amanuensis, and helper in collecting, preparing, labeling, organizing, and shipping the thousands of biological specimens acquired during the trip. One of his jobs during the Beagle years was to shoot animals for his master’s collections. McDonald takes as much as possible from the historical record and makes changes or fills gaps in knowledge as it suits his purposes. An important alteration of or addition to biographical history is making Covington profoundly religious, as the result of which, because of his interest in natural science and knowledge of Darwin’s thinking, he undergoes a long crisis of faith that reaches its climax upon publication of The Origin of Species. This aspect of the novel, however, operates in the context of a detailed character study, part bildungsroman and part representation of the subject’s later life, of a quirky and complicated personality whose lower-class origins and social and economic ambitions complicate his relationship with Darwin. Although in the novel Darwin’s influence looms over Covington’s life, the scientist remains mostly off stage, and even when present he comes across as a remote figure and not entirely comfortable, for social and temperamental reasons, with his assistant. The story is Covington’s.1 He seems worthy of this treatment because, while closely involved with Darwin during the years he developed the ideas that changed history, the scientist’s publications give him little notice. Not only was Covington’s work generally instrumental to Darwin’s accomplishment, but in one case it proved especially significant: Darwin uncharacteristically failed to write down the

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locations in the Galapagos from which his fi nch specimens were taken, but Covington, having made a separate collection for himself and learned from Darwin’s practices, had made the relevant notations. Thus upon return to England, when it became clear that the birds in their different forms were not, as previously thought, distantly related but rather closely related species, the servant’s contribution assisted Darwin in his conclusion that one species, an emigrant from South America, had in the islands diversified in response to varied environments. Covington’s birds bolstered Darwin’s evidence for evolution by natural selection (Mr. Darwin’s 303–04, 311–12). The novel carefully notes Covington’s role in this case along with his broad peripheral involvement in Darwin’s work. The text makes a gesture of retroactive recompense for overlooked accomplishment, much like that Tracy Chevalier affords Mary Anning. Mr. Darwin’s Shooter presents Covington by moving back and forth between two time frames. The fi rst takes him from early adolescence into early manhood and departure from Darwin’s service when he immigrates to Australia. The second concerns his last few years prior to an early death in his forties; during this time he works to cultivate a young surgeon named MacCracken as a friend and surrogate son. Left out, except in brief references, are those years in New South Wales during which he marries, fathers a large family, becomes wealthy through the accumulation of land and livestock, and welcomes a grown daughter, the product of an affair in South America during the Beagle voyage. This daughter, named Theodora, and MacCracken in particular become components in Covington’s plans to round out his life in a manner that addresses his troubled feelings about his past and his relationship with Darwin. In this regard he seeks to unify or accommodate two parts of his life, roughly identifiable as pre- and postDarwin, and accordingly to reconcile his religious faith with the knowledge of natural history, and then of evolution, that his association with Darwin had given him. With Bunyan’s character of Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) as inspiration, Covington as a boy, with little recognition of his lowerclass background nor how it might hinder his advancement through the world, imagines that the path of his life will lead to some wonderful fulfillment with marvelous adventures along the way. Unlike Christian, however, whose overcoming of worldly temptations at last allows him to arrive at the Celestial City, the young Covington makes no distinction between the worldly and the spiritual—he perceives everything as good. His innocence ends after he joins the crew of the Beagle and, through Darwin’s influence in particular, learns about his social inferiority and then about science. These damage his ideals of Christian brotherhood and his simple faith in biblical narratives that he had imbibed from his fundamentalist upbringing. Furthermore, they wound his self-respect and sully his joyful acceptance of his God-given world. In reaction, although he never abandons the fundamentals of Christian faith, his later life becomes a single-minded

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effort to gain self-affi rming worldly success and, even more important, to digest the forbidden fruit of science in a way that will restore his peace of mind and allow him to regain his faith in the goodness of God’s gifts and in his own worthiness to receive them. Doing so becomes the goal of his life’s pilgrimage, his Celestial City.

IV The qualities that associate Mr. Darwin’s Shooter with the neo-Victorian genre include the nature of its back-and-forth between the early and late phases of Covington’s life and a consequent dissolution of some conventional binary oppositions. This structure, rather than the more direct forms of character disclosure dominant in realist fiction, allows understanding to manifest gradually out of a chronological complexity that enacts the intricate interactions of past and present, and of nature and nurture, in a person’s life. These interactions, as we shall see, parallel present-day understanding of evolutionary history, knowledge of which the novel hybridizes with the nineteenth-century context of Covington’s character development. Like everyone, Covington is a puzzle that can be worked on but never completely solved, and the novel makes this clear as a measure of its respect. More generally, it creatively reconstructs a historically marginal figure. Through Covington it also reconstructs Victorian controversy over Darwinism, often conceived today as a simple matter of evolutionism vs. creationism, rendering something of its emotional and imaginative as well its intellectual complexities. The novel unsettles this opposition as well, at least in the experience of its title character. A further exercise in neo-Victorian hybridization involves expression. The novel is notable for the creativity involved in its rough-hewn, earthy, sometimes disjunctive or elliptical language of speech and narration, as well as for occasional colloquialisms formulated from nineteenth-century rustic or nautical slang mixed with authentic-sounding coinings. As example of the latter, the narrator twice refers to “bezooms”—for instance, in church “[h]is Pa dozed, dreaming of [his wife’s] bezooms that were like jellies in his palms when he woke in the mornings” (13). For the most part the narrator’s language opens up little distance between itself and that of speakers, but occasionally, because of that overall lack of distance, anachronistic language stands out indicating the historical vantage of a later time. Words and expressions that in their origins postdate what they characterize include “with a wing and a prayer,” “shutter exposures,” and “eidetic” (215, 227). Whether or not intentional, they constitute neo-Victorian hints of a gap between the time of authorship and that written about and hence both disjunction and the creative effort involved in joining the two. On occasion the narrator also employs knowledge gleaned from a later time, as when he comments that the “Covingtons recalled animals associated

170 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels with primitive man. They barely domesticated. . . . Say bullocks with clear foreheads and curly scruffs of hair from the ancient cave paintings of Spain and France—they were found in their lifetime. . . .” (7). Although they were discovered in their lifetime, stating that fact places their discovery, and the Covingtons themselves, in the past; the idea of “primitive man” itself only emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, with the fi rst fi nds of prehistoric human remains, whereas the narrative at this point is set in the early 1830s. By occasionally in expression and content stepping out of the nineteenthcentury context it carefully constructs, the novel enhances Covington’s story, adding poignancy to a full-bodied life previously slighted but now memorialized by fiction as a significant part of ongoing history. I will rehearse story elements of Mr. Darwin’s Shooter, along with the themes they develop, in some detail because the novel’s artistic and emotional success relies on recognition of how they are managed so as to converge in the last pages of the novel and in its fi nal sentence. If the novel works as I believe it was intended, in Covington’s dying we should comprehend and share Covington’s experience of release as he heals the breach between religion and science—or God and Darwin, or innocence and experience, or cerebral hemispheres perhaps—in a vision of wholeness that reconciles him to his life and death. This conclusion is “religious” in its broadest sense. We fi rst meet Covington as a twelve-year-old in the town of Bedford, where he lives with his family of butchers, working for them and then as a copyist for a leather merchant until laid off because of a bad economy. Bedford is where the imprisoned John Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress. That famous allegory, a virtual second Bible for Nonconformists, imaginatively and emotionally plays an important part in Covington’s life. Like Mary Anning the boy grew up as a Congregationalist, a denomination whose religious views largely agreed with Bunyan’s; early Congregationalists in New England were called “Pilgrims,” a name resonating with Bunyan’s book, the one essential text they took with them from England other than the Bible. Covington had grown up infatuated by the local chapel’s stained glass window depicting a scene taken from Pilgrim’s Progress. It shows Christian, its protagonist, jumping over a stile and, with glance and hand, gesturing others to follow him on his journey to the Celestial City: “His earliest memories were . . . of a man with golden curls. His name was Christian. He had rosy cheeks and wore a raspberry-red jacket with gold buttons. . . . On Sunday mornings he flew soaring over a stile and simultaneously looked back over his shoulder and met Covington’s gaze. . . . He made a beckoning gesture with a crooked fi nger: ‘Follow me’” (9). In actuality a crude attempt to mimic or challenge the decorative proclivities of Catholics and Anglicans (95), the window is a wonder for the young Covington, forming an eidetic memory and the basis for lifelong nostalgia after he leaves his family and Bedford behind. “Covington as a small boy felt happy inside the chapel where Christian strode in stained

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glass. Everything was newly made there, planed and nailed by sincere English carpenters. . . . It was done in the spirit of realness yet formed an otherworld for the Covingtons to take inside themselves” (10). The boy takes Christian’s invitation as a religious prompt and, more generally, as encouragement to embark on his own life of adventure. It also fuels the ambition for accomplishment that marks his life, ambition that in later years uncomfortably leaves him divided between the world of “realness” and the “other-world” of spiritual yearning. As a boy, however, his ambition and his confidence in following Christian’s path produce “the great trust that Covington had in the world’s advancement of his fate, that he was born to and found rarely shaken” (71). When an evangelical sailor named John Phipps shows up in town with a band of impoverished boys he has recruited for Christ and the sea, the unemployed Covington joins up and eventually follows them into naval service; his second voyage with Phipps and his converts will be aboard the Beagle. “But Phipps was not in a mood to lead his boys to Portsmouth in a hurry and fi nd them Christian commanders, of which he knew several. He fi rst wanted to check they could read their scriptures, and show in their hearts a love of the unseen” (24). A charismatic figure and a man sincerely concerned with the physical and spiritual wellbeing of his charges, Phipps never loses his emotional hold on Covington, even after Darwin replaces him as the chief influence in young Covington’s life. Phipps’s religion comports with that of Bunyan and of the Congregationalists, who vested authority in local congregations, generally rejecting dogmatism and ritual in favor of piety, reverence, and an ideal of godly conduct. Like Bunyan and the Congregationalists, Phipps adheres to the idea that every man can be his own priest, especially through intimate relationship with scripture, although spiritual guidance from others is welcomed. His lack of respect for worldly authority manifests in the poaching he freely undertakes to feed the boys and himself; he denounces the effects of the Parliamentarymandated enclosure movement that turned public lands into the private domains of the well-to-do (359). As with Bunyan, for Phipps salvation is all, but while this world abounds with temptations endangering the wayfaring Christian, it is also the scene of a grand spiritual adventure. Covington is captured by the man’s creation of a band of spiritual brothers, by his fatherly care, and by his rustic and powerful sermons, prayers, hymns, and catechisms. Phipps preaches and models a simple, humane, unsophisticated Christianity of the heart and of faith in the promise of redemption, hostile toward spiritual obstacles and opponents of the poor and needy, loving toward God and his spiritual gifts. Phipps’s religion of service and enthusiasm, his sense of life as a pilgrimage, reinforces the boy’s earliest yearnings catalyzed by the stained glass image of Christian. The window is one memory that lingers from this early phase of Covington’s life. Another is the barn where he gets to know Phipps’s band, eating and reading the Bible with them by candlelight and becoming part

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of their world; here Covington becomes attached, as is Phipps, to a playful, open-hearted little boy named Joey Middleton who will leave his mark on Covington’s life and psyche. A third memory is a great chestnut tree beneath which the group congregates. Its roots “made places to sit, benches and settles. . . . The leaves made an arbour above Covington’s head” (100). It feels like a temple of nature, a place consistent with the simple forms of communion and worship that Dissenters admired, and tried to emulate, in the lives of the early Christians described in the New Testament. Following his fi rst voyage and separated from Phipps and his adherents while visiting his family, Covington returns to the chestnut tree hoping but failing to meet the others but undergoing a form of religious experience regardless: “He stood there in wonder. . . . The tree was a throne in his eyes. The air was luminous around it, golden with autumn light. All creation sang in the presence of a maker who seemed . . . to be invisibly standing at his back and smiling. . . . He thought how the spirit was never seen, but felt, and so was known” (100). As he prays beneath the tree, “[i]n his aloneness he felt as if he rolled a stone from a door inside himself. A feeling shot up from inside him akin to light. It was such a powerful longing that it made a shape in his inner eye as he pressed his eyeballs with his knuckles. And who was standing there, dressed in white, gesturing him to follow. It was the son, Jesus of Nazareth.” He soon recognizes that his vision “was because he pressed his eyes tight while praying. But Lord did he have such gratitude for just being alive.” He then falls asleep in a ruined barn after singing to himself “Bunyan’s hymn, that was their anthem in chapel,” which ends with the claim that the true believer will “labour night and day / To be a pilgrim” (102, 103). The novel itself never endorses Christianity—the Father is invisible and a vision of the Son arises as a neurological response to physical pressure and spiritual longing. But it does sanction a set of religion-associated feelings, including the profound human desire for wholeness and meaning, that makes Covington sense himself as intensely alive, grateful, and sharing in natural abundance. The thing to note is how sympathetically the novel treats Covington’s early religion and that of Phipps, so much so that readers, whatever their attitude toward Christianity, should be able to share some of the protagonist’s concern when greater experience of the world begins to darken the heartfelt beauty of his previously unquestioned faith. Like Christian he encounters obstacles on his pilgrimage, though not the Slough of Despond or Vanity Fair. Instead he meets Charles Darwin.

V When Covington embarks on his career as a sailor his character is that of an innocent. His father claims that he is unaware of sin and that “[h]e would willingly serve the devil for a pat on the head, and likewise raise

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Christ’s hem from the dirt, e’en if it skunned his knees to the bone.” Phipps responds, “I can see that in him . . . It is why I want him in our crew” (26). This exchange broaches several important issues. First, Phipps is greatly attracted to Covington’s enthusiasm and open nature and what they can contribute to his evangelical cause, but he also takes it as his duty or challenge to bend these qualities to Christ and away from the Devil between whom Covington, it appears, is not predisposed to make a clear distinction. Second, Covington’s mixing of the two eventually causes great friction between himself and his leader, even though they never cease to love and respect one other. Covington never lapses into what most would consider serious immorality, but his gratification of sexual desire whenever opportunity arises offends Phipps, who construes it as worldliness and a straying from the path of righteousness; Phipps breaks Covington’s nose in an altercation over this issue. The boy’s nature leads him as readily to fun and physical enjoyment as it does to religious enthusiasm; he loves to play the fiddle he names “Polly Pochette,” engage in high jinks, and sensually appreciate the world about him. A third intimation of the passage, subsequently reinforced, is that as a young man Covington covets heroes, those he can look up to and follow and in return receive acknowledgement, if only “a pat on the head.” In this category fall Christian, Phipps, and then Darwin. Late in life in some sense he promotes MacCracken in this role, although in their complicated relationship Covington even more so becomes leader and father figure, appropriate for a man who though ambition, competence, and independence takes advantage of the relative classlessness of Australia to achieve wealth and status. As the novel progresses, moving back and forth between the older Covington and the boy and then young man who works for Darwin, the novel gradually discloses how its protagonist became the eccentric and mysterious adult, the Australian emigrant, to whom we already are introduced early in the novel through an initial foray into the future. This later Covington, large and powerful though physically battered by life, has become almost totally deaf from his years of shooting birds and mammals for Darwin’s collecting. He is guarded, hard to fathom, and unpredictable, by turns prideful, touchy, gloomy, exuberant, loving, and fi lled with hints of plans that for a long time are clear only to himself. How did he get this way from the open, fun-loving, fiddle-playing boy he once was? When aboard the Beagle Covington fi rst sees Darwin he in effect sees the Promised Land. Ambitious from the fi rst, whether for Heaven or the things of this world, he conflates Darwin with the never forgotten stained glass figure of the beckoning Christian. Here is a young Cambridge-educated gentleman, or “gent” as he is often called, the son of “the wealthiest man in Derbyshire” (111) and investigator of the natural world, a subject toward which Covington is predisposed. Darwin represents upward mobility if the former butcher’s-assistant and copyist can capture his attention and gain employment as a helper with the other’s scientific work. The devout Phipps

174 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels does not oppose the association since he too is well disposed toward Darwin; he has been shooting bird specimens for the young naturalist, who at this point still plans to become an Anglican priest, having not yet established himself as a scientist nor developed a theory contrary to literal readings of scripture. Through forwardness and competence Covington succeeds in making the transition from cabin boy to Darwin’s assistant, although both see him as more of a servant. This bothers Covington, who finds himself torn between wanting to please and wanting to be acknowledged as something more than a paid helper. He becomes resentful of his class inferiority, which he wishes to surmount through the very association that causes him to feel it most intensely. Therefore his behavior toward Darwin vacillates between subservience and a forwardness that sometimes amuses and sometimes annoys his master. Through his interactions with Darwin new or latent aspects of Covington’s personality overtake his former simplicity. Prior to being hired by Darwin, while still a nonentity to him, Covington’s complexity is underscored when Captain FitzRoy commandeers him for a demonstration of phrenology—a discipline attractive to neoVictorian novelists along with other eccentric Victorian enthusiasms such as animal magnetism and spiritualism—feeling his skull and then having Darwin do so as well. In a neo-Victorian twist, the characteristics the Captain discerns in this pseudoscientific exercise in fact come close to Covington’s actual character. FitzRoy ticks them off: “‘Amativeness—full. Philoprogenitiveness—full. Concentrativeness—ditto. Adhesiveness—full. Combativeness—large. Destructiveness—very large. Constructiveness— small. Secretiveness—large.’” Only the constructive-destructive reading is off base—unless it refers to Covington’s attitude toward himself and his growing unease with life—a response perhaps to his large, bony head and probably sour expression while examined. Phyloprogenitiveness, which means being reproductively prolific or loving one’s offspring, in both senses accurately predicts his future as well as capturing his sexual drive. Understandably he chafes under the entirely impersonal examination: “‘Am I a dumb ox. . . . to be used like this?’” he thinks (123). But Darwin’s laying on of hands carries symbolic weight, predicting his own role as a secular version of Phipps when he accepts Covington and unknowingly gains a disciple imbued with “adhesiveness” along with a growing battery of confl icts and worries. It is the death of the joyous and ingratiating Joey Middleton, Covington’s young friend, a favorite of the crew and a helper to Darwin, that indelibly fi xes Covington’s dissatisfactions on his heart. One day in port Darwin is having scientific provisions hauled aboard and Covington, at this point not yet having gained employment with the man, hopes to be singled out to help in the task and get himself noticed. “[B]ut the gent’s brown eyes still looked through him. ‘I am ashamed,’ thought Covington, ‘to be who I am.’” His way to counter that shame was a sudden whim: he would get the

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gent’s attention and if need be wrestle his service away from Joey” (114). But at this moment Joey, distracted by his playful lunge after a seagull, falls overboard, and although Covington hears the splash and subconsciously recognizes its significance, for a moment he fails to respond while waiting for Darwin to acknowledge him. Two sailors dive after Joey, but when Covington, who has been a great swimmer from boyhood on, attempts to follow them, “Phipps’s arms pinned Covington to the rails to stop him leaping. ‘The two of them are enough. More will get in their way’” (115). Joey’s dead body is recovered before Covington can bring himself to break away from Phipps, and he blames himself for failing to save his friend’s life because of being fi xated upon Darwin. Phipps weeps and Covington goes ashore without leave to nurse his grief, knowing for certain he will be flogged upon his return: “Their Capt eschewed exceptions. He spake the law of God. Covington could rely on him” (116). FitzRoy indeed was a stickler for discipline. This episode, both the death and the flogging that rips his back to shreds, leaves scars on Covington’s spirit and reduces his comfort in the reliability of “the law of God” operating in a world where tragedy and injustice strike a random. He does not lose his religion, but his life’s pilgrimage no longer leads along the carefree and certain path toward which Christian had beckoned him as a child. He still experiences moments of youthful exuberance, but gradually he becomes more withdrawn and wary, tendencies exacerbated by his growing deafness. And as he interacts with Darwin, whose presence had kept him from reacting immediately to Joey’s peril, Covington experiences guilt and tension between admiration and ambition on the one hand and resentment on the other. Covington’s experiences interact with his innate disposition to produce a complex and conflicted adult, yet he remains hopeful of somehow fulfilling his life’s early promise. He enjoys his work with Darwin—“It was a restless deep inquiry they were on. . . . There was no time when it came godless”—and he admires the intricate beauty of nature, especially of the bird specimens he collects and prepares (291, 262). Darwin himself initially offers no obstacles to Christian belief; when he fi nds a “lion-ant trap” in Australia like those in Europe, Darwin sees evidence for the argument from design: “Now what would a disbeliever say to this? Would any two workmen ever hit on so beautiful, so simple and yet so artificial a contrivance. . . . The one hand has worked over the whole world,” he declares in a slightly inaccurate quotation McDonald takes from Darwin’s Beagle diary (Mr. Darwin’s 347; Jan. 19, 1836). During the voyage Covington, like Darwin, fails to see the implications of the bones of extinct creatures he helps collect, and he accepts Phipps’s reason—suggestive of Philip Gosse’s dismissal of evolutionary evidence in Omphalos (1857), to be discussed in the next chapter—for why fossilized shells are found on the top of mountains: they “meant a playfulness in the mind of the Creator, a great teasing and tricksiness to test man’s easy diversion from the Right Way” (293).

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Later, free from class constraints and over the course of twenty years while Darwin in England refi nes and gathers evidence for his theory, Covington forges colonial success for himself in Australia. But by this time he better understands Darwin’s work. Thus success is not enough to exorcise his demons, which congregate around The Origin of Species once Covington learns in a letter from Darwin of its imminent publication.

VI When acute appendicitis interrupts his biannual coastal voyage from his home to Sydney to conduct business, Covington is taken to the nearest port and to Dr. MacCracken, a young surgeon who immediately operates and saves his life. During his recovery the patient becomes interested in his savior, a gifted but rather dissolute young man whose intervention he considers providential, and he initiates a confusing relationship that we receive mostly from MacCracken’s point of view. Covington is full of mysterious hints and cues about his life, including surprising knowledge of Charles Darwin. For example, he knows precisely how Darwin refers to finches in Voyage of the Beagle, knowledge MacCracken confi rms by consulting the book (39, 48). 2 That book had contributed to MacCracken’s decision to leave the United States and undertake his own travels that led him to South American, even to the Galapagos, and fi nally to his present situation in Australia (201). There, after some unprofitable adventures seeking gold in the interior, MacCracken established himself in a pleasant village existence buoyed by little work, a congenial housekeeper, social interactions with buddies, and nocturnal visits from a compliant young woman. But his life had become lax and routine, recognition of which Covington will fi nally jar him into recognizing. Covington represents a disturbance, by turns diverting and troublesome, as he entangles MacCracken in his life and interests. He fascinates the doctor with his oddities and often enigmatic behavior. His body itself, with powder burns on his face and scars on his back, is a mystery, but Covington withholds information about his past: “‘What ship? What navy? What crimes? What cruelties?’” the doctor asks himself, but “Covington gave no answer” (36). MacCracken is glad enough to see the older man recovered and able to depart for his business in Sydney and then puzzled and somewhat annoyed when he returns and takes up residence in a nearby cottage where his wife eventually joins him. Covington presses himself on MacCracken’s life in a number of ways, even drawing him into investments in land and livestock that work out quite well. Although he sometimes finds Covington’s presence oppressive, MacCracken admits to himself that he loves his strange friend and benefactor. But Covington remains reticent about himself and his past, including the religious devotion he has never lost but for whose continuance he fears.

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It takes two years before MacCracken, after reading a letter Covington fi nally decides to share with him, comes to understand the man and his behavior. Dating from just before Covington and MacCracken fi rst meet, the letter is from Darwin, who had corresponded with his former assistant over the years seeking information about unusual local flora and fauna and requesting specimens. The letter—both their overall correspondence and the letter are historically factual—announces what will turn into The Origin of Species: Dear Covington, I have for some years been preparing a work for publication which I commenced twenty years ago, and for which I sometimes fi nd extracts in your handwriting! The work will be my biggest; it treats on the origin of varieties of our domestic animals and plants, and on the origin of species in the state of nature. . . . (May 18, 1858; Correspondence 7: 95; McDonald 50)3 Covington in his novelistic guise had known in general terms where Darwin’s ideas were tending, but faced with the completion of a book that would defi nitively explain and share it with the world, he becomes intensely anxious, both frightened and fascinated by what it will say—frightened because he knows it will contradict his Christian beliefs and fascinated because of his interest in natural science and especially because of his role, working with a man already famous prior to the Origin, in making the book possible; perhaps it might even acknowledge him. At the same time he feels guilty about his involvement in what he now sees as Darwin’s aff ront to religion. One of Covington’s plans for MacCracken, about which neither doctor nor reader clearly understand until after Darwin sends Covington a copy of the newly published book, is to have him share his view of it and its significance, to become his “arbiter of understanding” (325). Anticipating a traumatic effect, Covington hopes MacCracken, well educated and scientifically informed, not only will make the book intelligible but present it somehow so as to render it acceptable. As publication approaches but before he reveals his connection to Darwin, he obliquely and in piecemeal fashion expresses his concerns to the man from whom he seeks consolation but whom he is leery of entrusting with his secrets. For one thing, MacCracken is a non-believer. Covington’s concerns anticipate some of reasons the Origin worried or offended many who based their faith on the Bible. For example, if evolution is true and humans are simply animals evolved from other animals, then they no longer are special beings, the center of creation as the Bible claims. So Covington assaults an uncomprehending MacCracken about the “[difference] between a man and a rat” and the absence of the human soul if there is no qualitative difference (64, 63). But Darwinian evolution calls into question the whole story of creation, championing instead

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a counter-narrative Covington calls “non-creation,” which is based upon geological time rather than Old Testament chronology and by extension subverts the historical accuracy of all biblical narratives: “‘Non-creation,’ said Covington, ‘is the idea that the Garden of Eden and the Flood of Noah are merely stories men tell each other. That when God said, “Let there be light,” there was no great flash. . . . Non-creation is the notion that there’s been more time on earth than any mortal is able to calculate, and that those who love the Bible are fools’” (219). During the Beagle voyage Covington had sometimes associated the ship with Noah’s as “a picture of cosy creation,” and at such times “nothing could touch his optimism” (248). But later, when he anticipates publication of the Origin, he associates the Ark with disillusionment: [T]he greats of English science . . . had no idea what Darwin was proposing. But Covington did. Just the two of them did: That species replaced each other in both time and place. That creatures occupying their various stations on earth had evolved from those who had gone before by a process of “natural selection”. . . . That Noah, whose Ark was often compared with their cramped old vessel as a preserver of creation, was nothing but a bearded braggart whose tale was woven from hempen homespun. (350) Facing loss of confidence in the biblical stories he loved, which had helped fi ll the world with meaning and beauty, he is left bereft and nostalgic for a time before his wounding by knowledge. As he recalls “sitting under an old chestnut tree,” he knows that he “was more spirit then . . . singing in his bones, a follower of heroes and at ease with animal nature, which he never doubted as the gift of God. He sighed for the immensity of a loss that he even now he was unable to concede” (327). While Christian and Phipps had been his heroes he had guides and knew no guilt; now he faces “a misery of doubt and anxiety regarding God; that a man might have only himself on this earth as a guide . . . and that such loneliness might be proved, and that the man to prove it had a servant, an accomplice in the affair, and his name was Covington” (309). The prospect of an alien, existential universe terrifies him. While daily working with Darwin and studying nature’s ways, he could imagine that the universal laws of nature that Darwin affirmed were God’s (271). Now was God to be banished? Gillian Beer sums up the matter: “McDonald endows Covington with religious belief that runs ecstatically counter to the implications of the theory he has helped to ground” (xxix).4 His gradual self-revelations to MacCracken lead up to an admission: “‘There is something you don’t know about me. . . . I have been shy to show it to you, lest I seem a relic like a mammoth or the sabre-toothed tiger. I am a natural religious man. I have my Pilgrim’s Progress by rote, my Genesis, my Psalms, and my Gospels all in order” (219). Covington’s

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anxiety about being seen as an extinct animal, a phenomenon he knows well from his work with Darwin, expresses not only concern about winning MacCracken’s respect and affection and possibly avoiding an atheistically corrosive response, but also his respect for scientific truth, largely up to date and intertwined with his allegiance to Darwin even as it troubles his religious faith. Had his admiration for science been less, his internal conflict also would have been less, or perhaps nonexistent. But because of his great respect for reasoned investigation and empirical truth, for what Darwin had shown him, he tries to prepare himself for resignation, for “Whatever shall appear on fair enquiry shall be the truth for there cannot be two truths” (320; emphasis original). The statement is an unacknowledged, slightly altered quotation from scientist John Herschel (1792–1871) and, tellingly, a favorite of the historical Darwin; such is the hold the fictionalized Darwin continues to exert on his one-time assistant.5 Therefore after MacCracken reads the Origin, Covington anxiously demands, “Is it proven?” (349; emphasis original)—as if what Darwin demonstrates as truth, and MacCracken endorses, must be Truth itself. McDonald’s novel relates the life of a man deeply torn in a way that many readers today probably could little comprehend without immersion in the historically and evolutionarily informed intimacy it fosters.

VII The disruptions and flow of Mr. Darwin’s Shooter between past and present, which will be intensified in Covington’s deathbed visions, enact an evolutionary view of history. First, evolutionary history is one of change, like the changes that impact young Covington’s life and whose contradiction of biblical, post-Genesis steady-state nature can only temporarily be suppressed by the wonderment of Darwin’s Beagle discoveries: Rocky islands and stones from beaches were living materials to [Darwin’s] eyes, likewise skeletons of fishes and birds from which he conjectured former existence. With his geology hammer it was knock and it shall be opened unto you. . . . their gent saw weather in the ground, and in the rocks of the islands, and talked of changes to the earth as if what was placed by God in enduring stability was a theatre of sorts. The thought opened the eyes of anyone who cared to consider it. Covington was one. . . . Phipps was another. . . . God’s book was a fatter volume than he had conceived. (124) With a similar sense of historical process and of wonder, through delving into Covington’s past the novel gradually divulges the sources of change that bring him to his fi nal condition. An example of such, the stained glass figure of Christian acts as a fossil of a stage in Covington’s life, something

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vanished in time whose traces remain and on occasion surface to influence his thoughts. Historical contingency is a second, overlapping aspect of how the novel employs an evolutionary mode in constructing its neo-Victorian story. In a couple ways it imposes this late twentieth-century emphasis upon its nineteenth-century source material. Evolution grows out of random variations and complex environmental changes that together stimulate organic development in a manner only retroactively intelligible; the path of future evolutionary development is largely unpredictable. Like everyone else, Covington begins life with innate qualities and then encounters places and people that change him and the course of his life in ways no one could predict. But the novel signifies these unpredictable intersections by repeatedly and, in most cases, directly connecting them, through its oscillation between Covington’s present and past, to consequences intelligible as such through knowledge of his later life. MacCracken in a reverie imagines, with a Godlike overview, deep time as a stream with “twisting currents and ceaseless motion.” This vision describes the view of history that underlies the presentation of Covington’s life: A rubble of shells and small stones lay under the flow. Nothing much seemed to happen as the torrent passed over, but then one of the pebbles or shells leapt, jerked, and changed position. Whole numbers of them gathered and piled, broke away, ran in pairs, bunches, and continued alone, or else were all gone and disappeared in a cloud of debris and mud as part of the stream-bottom went. Finally the water was clear again and it seemed as if nothing had ever been any different. (228) Evolution is like that, a history of unpredictable events with complex consequences, the evidence for which sometimes remains and sometimes disappears, but, when viewed in the present from a temporally limited human perspective, with the appearance that all remains as it always was. MacCracken’s vision adds to Darwin’s theory neo-Victorian awareness, developed in the late twentieth century, of the great variability in the rate of evolutionary change, which often occurs in relatively brief episodes punctuating long stretches of stasis. This idea applies to the development of Covington’s character in which the sudden changes caused by the unpredictable entries of Phipps, Darwin, and MacCracken into his life interact with periods of relatively little change to his character, including the twenty years in which he manufactures worldly success in Australia prior to announcement of Darwin’s publication and the appearance of MacCracken on the scene. Covington’s plan for MacCracken turns out to involve more than being a comforter in his anticipated struggle with the Origin. He also wants him as a son and as a husband for his beautiful and adventurous daughter, Theodora, and through them an extension into a future beyond the

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temporal confi nes of his own life. This extension of himself includes biology, includes Darwin in a sense: MacCracken also is a student of natural history, Covington cultivates the same interest in Theodora, and together they will most likely exercise the generative imperative that evolutionarily underlies the history of nature. If an aspect of religion is connecting oneself with something larger and more meaningful, then this is what Covington achieves as, in an ethically coherent fashion, he orchestrates the lives of those about him for both his own and their sakes. Before MacCracken is ripe for Covington’s purposes, however, even after Covington has attached the doctor to himself through affection and economics, he must shake the young man out of his life of complacency and non-commitment. The opportunity arises when an Aboriginal boy, nicknamed “Joey Pickastick,” whom MacCracken thoughtlessly taught to dive for coins for the amusement of colonials, drowns in one of his attempts and Covington recovers the body, after which the victim’s family go “running away with him rocking in their arms, giving out their wails” (204). Remembering, it appears, his failure to save another Joey—Joey Middleton—as well as his own former servitude, Covington punches MacCracken, breaks his jaw, and then has him transported to Covington’s own house. There he will reverse their roles, the doctor now being the patient, and provoke the young man into recognition of his own worth and of Covington’s also. First, however, the narrator shares an important detail. McDonald expresses fondness and admiration for his character throughout his novel, but it is encapsulated after the decision is made of where to take MacCracken and “Covington was nowhere to be seen. It emerged he was over at the blacks’ camp asking after the drowned boy, being the only one of them to go there and still in his sodden clothes too” (207). Tony Barta says that he took the title of his article, “Mr Darwin’s Shooters: On Natural Selection and the Naturalizing of Genocide,” from McDonald’s novel (116 n1), and, since the novel makes little mention of Aborigines or the fate of other native peoples, it may have been the emblematic death of Joey Pickastick that gave Barta his idea for the title.6 At Covington’s home MacCracken, who cannot talk but has time to watch and think, harbors no resentment over an assault he sees as a justified and needed response to a frivolous life, to carelessness of himself and others, and he comes to appreciate the consequences of his injury. He falls in love with Theodora, who has helped nurse him and who comes to love him in turn, and this sets the stage for a new life that the time-traveling narrator reveals will take MacCracken, after he marries the girl through her father’s further maneuvering, back to the United States and a career as a psychologist. Exposure to the mind of his quirky friend and benefactor no doubt influences this choice of vocation. More importantly for the novel, during his recovery he fi nally recognizes Covington, comprehending the originality and integrity of the man in his large-heartedness, sincerity, and anxious hopefulness. This is one thing Covington desired in disclosing

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himself to the other: acknowledgement of ontological significance, such as he had sought and failed to receive from Darwin, and in consequence acceptance of himself as he likewise pushes MacCracken into self-awareness. The patient also has the opportunity to read Covington’s gift copy of The Origin of Species, which his host had not yet been able to confront. MacCracken devours it and quickly becomes a convert. He fi nds in the book “a distillation into sensible theory of the entire majesty of the world. Even reduced to theory the majesty remained inherent, the mystery still swirled” (222). The novel mostly ignores the dark side of Darwin’s vision that offended many: a natural order of mindless proliferation, competition, death, and extinction. While thinking of Theodora, MacCracken does recognize in the Origin “the seething profligacy of creation and its object to breed at any cost” (226). But it is a liberating vision that stands out. The Origin, for example, produces in MacCracken a near mystical response in which all time seems subsumed in the present moment, thereby expanding his sense of self and allowing him to feel himself at home in the universe: “He felt part of time with a deep contentment and understanding—all times past and future as well as this very particular moment” (222). Jay Clayton identifies this passage as one of those, made “[a]t several critical junctures in the novel, [in which] the author mentions the vertiginous time-sense that his characters experience whenever they make geological or paleontological discoveries” (174). “Vertiginous” perhaps is not the right word; in this case “deep time” does not produce the dizzying effect it has on characters like Swift’s Mathew Pearce or Chevalier’s Mary Anning.7 MacCracken fi nds majesty, wholeness, and peace in the present moment, and his experience of synchronic temporality anticipates Covington’s fi nal thoughts and feelings that he experiences on his deathbed. It is the wonder of Darwin’s vision of nature that prevails. It is not until after MacCracken and Theodora leave for America that Covington finally reads the Origin, in his case slowly and laboriously, and reacts much differently than had his son-in-law. As he anticipated, it agitates him greatly, both the content and “the effort of holding one book in his mind and remaining true to its texts while considering the rule of another.” But soon “it came to Covington that his agitation was coming to an end, and he had better summon his spirits to him or there was no knowing what. For he was leaving home for ever, and doing it courageously, blindly” (355, 356). The fi nal pages of the novel follow the workings of Covington’s mind as he sinks toward death with the same fortitude and hope with which he left Bedford for the sea and England for Australia. Having gained a son, married a daughter, and thereby, along with his passion for the natural world, extended his legacy into an indefi nite future, he is now ready to move beyond the Origin and his own origins, beyond the divisions that long had tormented him. This is not accomplished through intellect but rather a state of delirium that creatively mixes fiction with history in a dream version of the novel itself.

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Memories flow and morph into various scenes and bring together the threads of Covington’s life. John Phipps appears, and at fi rst the dying man regrets substituting Darwin for a man “whose congregation consisted of frogs in the wet grass, moles in the banks, spiders, snails, and the very birds tumbling through the air; and also the fish in the sea. . . . And Covington had given it away for sixty pounds a year and a catechism in which was recited the families of creatures . . . and everything was sealed in a book that dared say it knew better than earnest old Bunyan’s.” And yet Phipps’s animal “congregation” in its details and grandeur resembles Darwin’s. In the dying man’s dreams Phipps catechizes and confi rms him in the general articles of Christian faith, leaving him “comforted” (356–57, 358). And gradually, in imagery and a phantasmagoria of shifting narrative fragments, Phipps and Darwin are brought together along with other elements of Covington’s rich past. These include the stained glass window, the chestnut tree, the barn where Phipps’s boys commune, Joey Middleton, and the Beagle, each wrapped in layers of feeling. Darwin joins Phelps and the others at the barn: The two men embraced. There was a mood of withheld love between everyone present. A breeze stirred the cold, and John Phips led them out to the shelter of a broad, bare-branched chestnut tree. Its trunk was like a wall, with roots making seats and footrests and arms for the weary. It was the old meeting place from a time when Congregationalists were driven from lawful worship. Many had gone to America where they had built a new Bedford. (361) Reconciliation, love, shelter, a fresh breeze, pilgrimage to a new world: the passage is replete with intimations of comfort gained through transcendence of ego-bound discriminations and arrival at a secular version of Bunyan’s Celestial City. Lost is Covington’s vexed preoccupation with whether or not biblical narratives are literally true. Instead he reconceives his life by transmuting elements of personal history, including the mythic narratives that once had eased his relation to the world, into a new story of coherence, integrity, and courage. In contrast, Georges Letissier claims that at the end of the novel Covington is “subjected to hallucinatory visions in which various episodes from his past life mingle in total chronological disorder, until he fantasies some improbable—and, at the reader’s level, parodic—reconciliation between religion and science” (84). That interpretation overlooks the discourse in the rest of the novel, which, apart from some dialogue perhaps, generally avoids irony, parody, or any other form of indirect message-sending. Considering his narrator’s straightforward, sympathetic commentary on Covington, for McDonald to allow his character to be undercut in his dying moments, when a “chronological disorder” of memories and even “reconciliation” are very realistic possibilities, would be an artistic misstep.

184 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels Reconciliation after all is what Covington has been seeking throughout his adult life and beginning to achieve in its final phase through MacCracken, Theodora, and even the Origin. The conclusion is the culmination of this process. His fi nal visions represent a great and confused imaginary leap, but they are in keeping with the life the novel shares with us. None of this supports religion, but it does support the sincerity of Covington’s religion; his deathbed visions fit with the quality of his youthful religious experience informed by his ability to meld the wonders of the biblical narratives with the wonders of nature and to attach them to the unity and value of his own identity. Upon his deathbed he regains this kind of innocence. Writing about his novel, McDonald refers to this conclusion—“the moment of reconciliation” that “bring[s] the pages to a close”—as an attempt “to reach a reconciliation of science and religion” (“Syms” 61; “Evolution”). At the very end Covington “saw Darwin on his knees, and there was no difference between prayer and pulling a worm from the grass. As for Mr Covington he prayed in the old-fashioned way. It was the last of anything he knew” (361). On his knees as if in prayer, Darwin becomes the symbol of respect for life, where immanence and transcendence meet and the distinction between investigation and worship collapses along with that which had divided the two men. Ever fascinated by small phenomena that across time and space produce enormous effects, Darwin shortly before his own death published his short study, begun long before, of earthworms and their critical contributions to the soil and hence to all plant and animal life.8 Implicitly Darwin and Covington are joined even in their deaths. And now, in reference to the novel’s title, Covington also is designated “Mr” as class differences are erased and integrity, courage, and accomplishment acknowledged. At the end superficial details taken so seriously in life disappear. There is no hint of afterlife—“It was the last of anything he knew”— but there is insistence upon human potential in this world, the possibility, in Jesus’s memorable phrase from John 10:10, to “have life, and have it more abundantly.” What matters in religion and science is whatever contributes to and does not detract from that end.

VIII In Mr. Darwin’s Shooter Darwin transcends his role as Devil’s chaplain in his effect on its protagonist. This is the opposite of what occurs in This Thing of Darkness and in Ever After, which stand out from other novels studied in this book because in those two novels there is no overcoming of crises of faith in self or in something greater than self—God and romantic love respectively. In Thompson’s and Swift’s narratives the universe ultimately affords no wonders, whether realized or only hinted at, of the sort elicited by a holistic comprehension of nature and human reality in novels such as Jenny Diski’s Monkey’s Uncle and Liz Jensen’s Ark Baby, the

Devil’s Chaplain

185

subjects of the next chapter. These texts resemble Mr. Darwin’s Shooter by allowing their main characters, in the novels’ fi nal pages, to transcend isolation and self-division through scientifically informed visions of reality that enhance self-worth and mutuality. In both novels, however, Darwinism again represents an antagonist that must be confronted. Darwin appears as a character in Monkey’s Uncle, which again dramatizes his baleful effect on FitzRoy but only as part of its larger narrative, and briefly in Ark Baby although there his influence is felt throughout.

8

Victorians and Other Apes Monkey’s Uncle and Ark Baby

I Ichthyosaurs and other extinct creatures posed problems of understanding and sometimes of faith for the pre-Darwinian nineteenth century. After the publication of The Origin of Species monkeys and apes—today as in Victorian times often confused with one another—became the most evocative and problematic species regarding humanity’s relationship to nature. The resemblances of people to other primates of course were obvious prior to the Origin, but Darwin made them into family resemblances. Some found this evolutionary connection amusing; for example, W. S. Gilbert penned for the comic opera Princess Ida (1884) the satirical lines, “Darwinian man, though well-behaved, at best is only a monkey shaved.” But many found the relationship disturbing. At the London Zoo in 1842 Queen Victoria saw an orangutan and pronounced it “frightful and painfully and disagreeably human” (qtd. in Ridley 9). It was successor to the fi rst orangutan brought to the zoo, an animal named Jenny that is the basis for a character in Jenny Diski’s Monkey’s Uncle. In that book and Liz Jensen’s Ark Baby apes are important for the novels’ ambitious neo-Victorian exploration, by turns comic and serious, of what it means to be human. These texts have attracted little scholarly attention, the case likewise for Nicholas Drayson’s two novels described in the next chapter.

II Like This Thing of Darkness, Jenny Diski’s Monkey’s Uncle narrates Robert FitzRoy’s life, including his long struggle against religious doubt, but only as his nineteenth-century story periodically and unpredictably enters into that of the novel’s present-day protagonist, Charlotte Fitzroy, a middle-aged “genetic researcher and former political activist” (14). After reading a book entitled FitzRoy of the Beagle, an actual biography by H. E. L. Mellersh published in 1968, she claims its subject as her ancestor, identifying with him because of their shared name, their facial resemblance, and

Victorians and Other Apes 187 their difficult lives. In particular, Charlotte also feels hereditarily doomed to despair and possible suicide; like her supposed nineteenth-century forbearer, her father killed himself and apparently his father had as well (153). She becomes an unseen observer present at dramatic times in FitzRoy’s life—scenes that elaborate on and sometimes greatly alter what the biography actually tells—stretching from his captainship of the Beagle to his suicide. The novel’s poignant FitzRoy story line is realistic; Charlotte’s ghostly observational presence at the beginnings and ends of detailed episodes in his life is not, even if they are understood as manifestations of her intense imaginings. In the 1990s narrative, Charlotte, with great unconscious creativity, establishes a self-protective split personality following a breakdown. She had suppressed much pain in her life stemming from her mother’s resentment of her very existence, her father’s abandonment, her responsibility for a car crash that killed her children’s father with whom she had conducted a long-term affair, her emotional alienation from her son and daughter, and her daughter’s death. Charlotte receives psychological therapy and copes as best she can until, under the influence of FitzRoy’s story and her emotionally repressed past, she attempts suicide. Her life represents one dimension of the novel; in it she is severely depressed but not, we are told, insane. A second dimension concerns the “mad” part of her mind, split off and buried deep in her unconscious but periodically shared with the reader. This aspect of her psyche, which is described as being on mental holiday, experiences a humorous and entertaining world of magic realism and dream logic/ illogic where on a sunny beach she interacts with an intelligent, well-spoken orangutan named Jenny and a madcap threesome composed of Marx, Darwin, and Freud. Charlotte unconsciously has consigned these “monuments to nineteenth-century thought and twentieth-century activity,” once her heroes, to a limbo of buffoonery because she feels, in light of twentieth-century history, they failed to help her or anybody else (180–81, 64). They bicker, trot out their pet theories, preoccupy themselves with eating and sleeping, and, although aware of themselves as figments of Charlotte’s mind, act as if they are independently real; often they inadvertently—or on some level half-intentionally, since Charlotte is their author—raise issues relevant to her life. Jenny comes off better. Wise and well informed but prickly about her orangutan identity, she wears a frock and straw hat and behaves with much decorum. She is an expert on Charlotte’s conscious and unconscious and contributes to her recovery through their conversations in which dialectic amounts to Charlotte’s self-engagement. At the London Zoo the conscious Charlotte had encountered an actual orangutan, the basis for Jenny, with whom she deeply identifies because of the animal’s “resigned despair” (12). Jenny tells the split-off Charlotte about the string of former Jennies at the zoo, beginning with the fi rst orangutan brought there in 1837; she reports that it became so famous it had tea with the Queen (33, 91–92). In 1838 the historical Darwin visited that fi rst orangutan and was greatly

188 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels impressed by her human-like qualities and ability to mimic human actions. Jenny, as if she indeed has independent knowledge and existence, supplies information previously unknown to Charlotte. Decidedly postmodern in literary approach, Monkey’s Uncle mixes non-fiction with fiction, present with past, and sanity with insanity, creating epistemological complexities that provoke questions about psychology, biology, history, and human identity but soon defeat, as pointless, any concerns readers might have about the narrative logic of Charlotte’s delusions including her ability to witness detailed scenes from FitzRoy’s life. In broad terms the dreamscape with Jenny and the three demoted sages makes sense understood as a sequestering of the best part of Charlotte, including her humor and creativity, so that it can rest, survive, and begin to reintegrate itself with the depressed conscious Charlotte. Through echoes, allusions, and chapter epigraphs, this extravagantly fanciful dimension of Charlotte’s story particularly echoes Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871), as does the novel in general. In Monkey’s Uncle the story of, in effect, Charlotte in Wonderland comes and goes along with episodes from her waking life and scenes inspired by the biography. The FitzRoy story incorporates a more serious and historically grounded version of Darwin, who thus has a double presence in the novel. Of the three erstwhile intellectual icons in Charlotte’s visionary world, Darwin is the most developed as a character and the only one who momentarily dissipates the satire. This occurs when he laments the loss of his beloved daughter Anna, much as Darwin did in real life. In the novel he says that if God existed “it would only have meant that we were the playthings of an evil intelligence. They wanted me to believe there was a heavenly purpose in suffering. I watched my lovely Annie die, slowly, inevitably. . . . she suffered terribly and died. . . . There was no purpose in her death. . . . The only solution to such a pointless loss is accident, in a universe governed only by the laws of blind, purposeless nature” (183–84). When Charlotte, playing devil’s advocate, or nonadvocate, asks Darwin, “who would want to believe there is nothing out there which cared about us one way or another? Didn’t the idea that the human race was the result of an aimless process bother you?” he answers merely that his theory must be right (183; emphasis original). Darwin’s reaction to his daughter’s death resonates with Charlotte’s response to the death of her daughter whom she, however, had been unable to mourn— one of the novel’s many historical and intertextual connections. Charlotte had repressed much; the novel does not give up on Freud even if she has. But the exchange between Charlotte and Darwin is important in showing that she wants meaning and is making it for herself: she has articulated through another the suffering she has not allowed herself to feel. How Charlotte knows about Darwin’s actual life, apart from what the FitzRoy biography discloses, is unclear.

Victorians and Other Apes 189 Much as the imagined Darwin accepts that death has no meaning, he believes humans have no special significance that separates them from other species: “mankind wasn’t a special case in nature” (131). Nevertheless, he speculates that somehow humans might be on the path to becoming special but at present are flawed or incomplete. He suggests this idea in relation to the missing link issue, the once popular notion that fossil remains midway between humans and apes must show up if Darwinian theory is correct. Darwin hypothesizes to Charlotte “that we haven’t arrived at Homo sapiens yet, and we’re just the intermediate species. Now, that would explain why there are no fossils, and a few other things too” (83). His observation suggests Charlotte’s status as she struggles in an intermediate state between, on the one hand, escapism and insanity and, on the other, reality and integration. In general Monkey’s Uncle shows humans as anything but “sapiens”— knowledgeable or wise—because of their readily demonstrable irrationality and ignorance. Believing that humans indeed are fundamentally flawed, Jenny explains that humanity’s “real curse is overcapacity of the brain box. Nature did a little experiment: give this species more than it needed and see if it could fi ll the gap between capacity and thought. . . . All that extra space just fi lled up with garbage: mostly self-delusion and grandiose plans. . . . What you get are hopes and fears” (238). She associates this maladaptive condition with the conscious, depressed Charlotte. If special, humans are only such in an unfortunate way. Jenny is more favorable regarding her own species, although, like the original London Zoo orangutan, she apes human ways—in her case so as not to see herself as an animal. In wishing to distinguish herself from other species she is like most humans; the lesson of Darwinism has had limited impact on her. Jenny is human, un-human, a closely related primate, and something of a super-human in her knowledge. She is one of the ways the novel questions and destabilizes humanity’s biological and ontological special status as Homo sapiens. But Charlotte gives up concern about what humanity is or should be along with the idea that any theory suffices to explain or enhance the human condition. She tells Marx, Darwin, and Freud that they had accomplished nothing—that “science has provided no more comfort or certainty than religion did. The only theory that hasn’t been tried yet is the theory that there is no theory at all, and we’ve all just got to get on with it as best we can.” Freud replies, “You are mad, you know, and wandering about in a non-existent space of your own talking to orang-utans. If that’s what you call getting on with it, then I’m a monkey’s uncle” (185–86). But her statement is part of a mental breakthrough. She was once an obsessed activist for Marxism and feminism, to such a degree that she neglected her children and denied them knowledge of their father, having reconstructed a man she loved as just another male. But she begins to admit her problems and that their solution will not come from compensatory theories but from what she

190 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels can learn for and about herself. So she does “get on with it,” thereby making Freud “a monkey’s uncle.” Freud’s comment provides the title for the novel, places humans in their biological context, and alludes to Robert FitzRoy. Because of his religion he denies the connection of humans to other primates but suffers from self-doubts associated with the suicide of his famous maternal uncle, Lord Castlereagh (1769–1822). FitzRoy sees signs in himself of the insanity that he fears runs on his mother’s side of the family and eventually will claim him. His actual insecurity helps explain, as over-compensation, both the inflexibility and perfectionism with which he carries out his duties and his fierce adherence to religious fundamentalism. Feeling unstable and seeing himself victim of a shameful lineage because of having a dishonorable uncle in his family tree, FitzRoy is, in effect, the nephew of a monkey’s uncle—therefore a monkey himself, something shameful beneath his carefully maintained dignity. This flaw in his self-worth comes to the fore when Darwinism raises the specter of actual monkey ancestors. Monkey’s Uncle unfolds FitzRoy’s story through episodes involving underlying doubts that had made his adherence to Christianity and duty all the stricter. It is a crisis in his own identity built upon fear of hereditary insanity and upon both the fear and attraction of suicide. Compounding his problem, once he becomes captain of the Beagle, is the example of its previous captain, who killed himself because of the pressures of command. FitzRoy’s fi rst outright psychological debilitation occurs when he realizes, in connection with the scrupulous manner in which he carries out the Beagle’s job of charting coasts, that no matter how accurate his representations of coastal outlines, they become inaccurate when the coast is looked at on a smaller scale: with increased resolution each irregularity discloses further irregularities (21–23). Contemplating problems of relativism and indeterminacy with a mind craving certainty, FitzRoy suffers a mental breakdown. Then, after the Captain’s recovery, the young Darwin introduces a religious uncertainty into FitzRoy’s life: Darwin’s geological observations, based on his reading of Lyell, force the other to admit that the volcanic Galapagos, rather than being vestiges of Noah’s flood and the original six days of Creation, must have volcanically risen gradually from the sea throughout immense ages (75–76). The novel follows other low points in FitzRoy’s life and career including the Admiralty’s lack of adequate support for his conception of the Beagle mission; economic setbacks; his failure, through no great fault of his own, as colonial governor of New Zealand; the death of a wife and daughter; and humiliation because his weather forecasts, part of his work as one of the founders of meteorology and meant to save lives at sea, are noticed more for their inaccuracies than successes. The limited ability of forecasts to cope with the complexities of weather introduces another example of indeterminacy into FitzRoy’s life and into the novel. His two greatest defeats, however, involve Fuegians and Darwin. As recounted also in This Thing of Darkness, FitzRoy had taken the three

Victorians and Other Apes 191 young Fuegians back to England on his fi rst Beagle voyage, and Monkey’s Uncle records their experiences in acculturation. These include an audience with the King and Queen which, the novel reports, Queen Charlotte later will recall on the occasion of the orangutan’s visit, causing her to connect apes with Fuegians. On his second voyage, famous because of Darwin’s participation, FitzRoy returns the three Indians to their homeland along with a missionary and ample supplies for building, farming, and establishing a base from which to begin a campaign in religious and cultural conversion. When later the ship returns, the would-be settlers have been reduced to abject suffering and penury by attacks from Fuegians; the traumatized missionary only wants to get away. What had appeared a mission from God now seems quite otherwise, and the experience is traumatic for FitzRoy and his self-respect. Nevertheless, it is Darwin who is the Captain’s great nemesis. FitzRoy’s fi nal downfall results from the publication of The Origin of Species and from the subsequent, famous 1860 “evolution debate” at an Oxford scientific meeting he attended merely to present a paper on meteorology. According to how the story is usually told, at the conference Thomas Huxley vanquished Bishop Wilberforce, who had been scientifically prepped by anatomist Richard Owen, after the cleric tried to poke holes in Darwin’s theory and ended by asking Huxley if his descent from a monkey was through his grandfather or his grandmother. Huxley’s response, that he would rather be an ape than a man with great talents who used them for ridicule, brought down the house. This Thing of Darkness fictionalizes the whole affair in more detail. In Monkey’s Uncle, when FitzRoy tries to denounce evolution and uphold the Bible “a chant began to rise from the back of the hall. ‘Monkeys! Monkeys! Monkeys!’ the young men jeered, and fi nally drowned out FitzRoy’s words as the cry was taken up all around the room.” Trying to counterattack, he waves a Bible in the air and shouts “The Book! The Book! The Book!” thereby looking like a maddened religious fanatic and making himself “a laughing stock not only among the ignorant students, but among his peers as well” (165, 166). It is FitzRoy’s fi nal disgrace, and he blames Darwin: “He had deprived the world of the loving care of an infi nitely good Creator, and put damned monkeys in His place” (190). FitzRoy slits his throat while making a fi nal leap of faith: that despite his ungodly act God would understand and forgive him (190, 193). Monkey’s Uncle sensitively handles FitzRoy’s religious faith, his underlying doubts, and his suffering. Like Thompson’s novel it tells a story that in its improbability seems like fiction: two obscure young men brought together by chance end up, many years later, representing two sides of a historically monumental drama encapsulating the nineteenth-century clash between science and religion experienced by those unable to reconcile the two. In the last quarter of Monkey’s Uncle there is no overt attention to FitzRoy and monkeys. The issue now is what Charlotte has learned. Throughout most of the narrative the lesson she derives from her adopted ancestor

192 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels is one of determinism: both of them were doomed by their “blood.” But FitzRoy’s story, in conjunction with her conversations with Jenny and the three un-wise men, leads her to recognize that she can affect her own fate despite FitzRoy’s negative example. The sheer creativity of her mental life locates what is true and valuable in Charlotte and discards the Charlotte victimized by her life of repressed suffering that she had tried to offset through political causes. “Charlotte had never been religious” (61–62), but big theories and ideologies had been her religion. These she now abandons in favor of self-realization in the everyday world, and the wonderland of the unconscious also disappears from the story as she begins to reintegrate herself. In particular she learns that life is a mixture of fate and chance, of order and disorder, and that if there is to be order she must exercise her free will to create it. Despite her belief that “science has provided no more comfort or certainty than religion did,” Charlotte, herself a scientist, fi nds in science—geometry, theoretical physics, and genetics—the clues she needs for realizing a largely coherent and hopeful identity. On a train Charlotte encounters Benoit Mandelbrot (1924–2010) while she is in the process of looking at a map—a reminder of FitzRoy’s problem with the indeterminacies of scale as well as of the frequency with which neoVictorian novels mix fictional with actual historical figures. Mendelbrot explains to Charlotte a bit about his theory of fractals, which are naturally occurring patterns that within apparent irregularities repeat themselves on diminishing scales. Emphasizing the disorder more than order involved in fractals, Mendelbrot tells Charlotte that “[e]verything is infi nitely regressively bumpy. All bumps have bumps on them. So nothing fits together, you see. That is what we call the Humpty Dumpty Effect.” In reply Charlotte says, “nothing would ever get broken. . . . because it wouldn’t have been together in the fi rst place” (249). Mendelbrot, who is on his way to “a conference on Chaos and Predictability,” responds that “[t]hings go on in spite of underlying reality” and then quotes an exclamation by Humpty Dumpty from Though the Looking Glass: “There’s glory for you!” In the spirit of Carroll’s paradoxes and contradictions, Charlotte agrees: A great dichotomy of all things striving to be one thing, and all things infi nitely separate, fi lled her with the most extraordinary surge of hope . . . which spread through her, being itself, and needing, therefore, to be nothing else. It was now clear to her how everything fitted together and never would, and how movement and stillness, light and dark, truth and deception . . . were created out of that single contradiction which kept winds blowing and hearts beating and minds racing to and from conclusions which never could, would or should be conclusive. (251) Fractals are complex systems, meaning that, existing in a state between chaos and order, they appear both random and deterministic. As Charlotte recognizes, weather is such a system; FitzRoy had struggled with it. So is

Victorians and Other Apes 193 the process of evolution. One idea that apparently appeals to her is the inherent contradictoriness in the nature of things, which implies that she can accept in herself a degree of self-contradiction. But she also senses the self-organizing capability of the mind to push complexity in the direction of greater order. She “is not broken” but largely whole, and at the same time she is part of “all things striving to be one thing.” Out of these paradoxes, through a mixture of science and personal psychology, she takes what she needs and has been working toward: self-integrity, connectedness, and the freedom to manifest both. Charlotte’s fascination with genetics also contributes to her epiphany. Through much of the novel she connects genes with hereditary determinism, as she does in her identification with FitzRoy, but later it is the genetic specialness of an individual that captures her attention, although in effect she already had been fascinated by that quality as a child. When she was a schoolgirl sex education had interested her for only one reason: the idea of the fertilized cell’s completeness and uniqueness. As an adult she once more associates that originary cell with desired self-integrity. She also equates it with a pearl necklace her father, married to someone other than her mother, had given to her as a child before leaving forever, forced away by his jealous wife and soon to commit suicide. The pearl comes to represent the desired essential self encapsulated in the unique one-cell package of genes Charlotte had once been, before external factors began influencing her development. Emotionally charged by its association with a father she loved and who loved her, the pearl represents, in this case by opposing one of the meanings of fractals, the symbol of her worth and wholeness. She was “a creature made by other creatures, and of them, yet until the fi rst splitting of that fi rst cell, an entirety which would never be completely obliterated by complexity and event. . . . And it was that elementary single entity alone, out of all the matter and circumstance in the world of large and small. . . . which, beneath its bumpy surface, did not have infi nitely receding surfaces with it. It was the single entity, and would remain so” (257). The confidence she gains in her fundamental integrity allows her fi nally to escape the egocentricity of having, through repression and insanity, to avoid and protect a threatened self. This releases her to care about other selves. She had been estranged from her son, who bitterly resents the lack of care and concern she had shown throughout his life, but at the end of the novel she sends him the pearl as her only family heirloom—emblem of her father and of her self-discovery—and asks him to visit her, saying that they can “talk together. It’s time we did, and perhaps we can, after all.” The novel ends with the thought of Charlotte or the narrator or both: “It was all there was to do, and perhaps, after all, it might be enough” (258). The conclusion is hopeful though not conclusive. In this it is like much scientific investigation. Nevertheless, in all but a couple of neo-Victorian novels dealt with in this book, science helps characters fi nd or accept themselves in relationship with external reality. In Diski’s

194 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels novel genes and fractals take over this role, although evolutionary biology is implicit in the connection Charlotte makes between herself, orangutans, and FitzRoy’s trial by monkeys. To be a monkey’s uncle, or nephew, or descendant does not imply being the victim of evolutionary, hereditary, or any other sort of fate. Monkey’s Uncle offers that message, although nothing is assured: “conclusions . . . never could, would or should be conclusive.” Indeed, through its postmodernism and involvement in chaos theory, the novel does what it can, without descending into incomprehensibility, to represent a world where nothing is set or final or irreducible or perfectly coherent. It seems appropriate, then, if artistically problematic, that its three narratives come and go seemingly at random, that in them and their interrelationship there is much illogic, and that the connection between monkeys, fractals, and fertilized eggs is not worked out with much clarity. The novel signifies its attempt to do what sophisticated art does: draw readers and observers into meaning-making. Charlotte makes sense of her life and becomes comfortable with an open-ended reality where nothing is conclusive but where, for that reason, freedom is possible. Building on what she learns from therapy and her mental “holiday,” she asserts the significance of the pearl and fertilized egg and acts upon that understanding. Perhaps Jenny the orangutan is right and the human ape-mind has evolved into a form that makes happiness difficult to achieve, and certainly it is true that the world will always be a mystery, never to be completely understood. But for that reason, and sometimes through the mind’s attempt to transcend its limitations, life can be experienced as remarkable along with everything else that evolves out of the complexity of chaos and order in which “[t]hings go on in spite of underlying reality. There’s glory for you!” Like most other neo-Victorians novels that adopt the subject of science and religion, Monkey’s Uncle locates, through science and without religion, a world of wonder. Even being related to a monkey can be wondrous.

III Monkeys and apes thematically inhabit another over-the-top, largely comic novel, Liz Jensen’s Ark Baby. Like several other texts discussed in this study, it also records the impact of Mesozoic fossils on Victorian Britain: “Dinosaurs were the talk of [London]; the terrible lizard had the educated world a-jitter with excitement. Bones of these lumbering and monstrous creatures had recently been discovered in the chalk soil of Lyme Regis, and fossilized dragons had been unearthed in China. A frightening light was being shed on the makings and doings of the earth” (97). With only a touch of exaggeration this passage captures the excitement and anxiety produced by the idea of enormous extinct creatures whose one-time existence and ancientness did not jibe with either the Bible or the often Bible-constrained

Victorians and Other Apes 195 science of the day. Seemingly as unaccountable and out-landish to the British as dragons in exotic and outlandish China, the discovery of dinosaur fossils joins other religiously discordant scientific developments, evolutionary theory in particular, to produce yet another neo-Victorian version of “the crisis of faith.” The subject weaves in and out of an impressively complicated novel that, like the other three novels I discuss in this and the concluding chapter—Diski’s Monkey’s Uncle and Drayson’s Confessing a Murder and Love and the Platypus—are not well known nor in some cases readily obtainable. An evolutionary fantasy inflected with magical realism and satirical treatment of both the past and the present, Ark Baby consists of five intertwined narratives. One is a contemporary story told primarily by an Elvis-loving veterinarian who changes his name to Buck de Saville and moves from London to the isolated seaside town of Thunder Spit to avoid malpractice charges for euthanizing a pet monkey. Three stories concentrate on mid-Victorian England: the physically peculiar Tobias Phelps, a foundling, relates his vexed childhood in Thunder Spit and what ensues; an omniscient narrator centers her story on Queen Victoria’s taxidermist, Ivanhoe Scrapie, on his wife, Charlotte, a spiritualist who dies and becomes a ghost, and on their daughter, Violet; and, fi nally, a sideshow contortionist and ballerina, who turns out to be Tobias’s mother who abandoned him as a baby, shares her bizarre experiences in recollections full of amusingly suggestive misspellings. A fourth Victorian narrative only gradually comes together as it informs the other three. It has to do with the fate of a ship, the Ark, sent on behalf of Queen Victoria to circumnavigate the earth, following the course of Darwin’s Beagle; its charge is to collect new creatures she can have Scrapie stuff as part of her collection of clothes-wearing trophies, most of them mounted in postures of prayer but with primates posed as servants. These five story lines at fi rst operate independently, but as historical connections and parallels in action and theme become apparent, they gradually converge, reinforcing one another, fi lling in gaps and mysteries, and coming to simultaneous, overlapping conclusions. Increasingly involved in all five narratives is “the Gentleman Monkey,” so named for the mild behavior and good manners of his species. The last representative of this advanced type of North African tailed ape, he is fi nally revealed as Tobias’s father—although the novel hints at the connection from early on. Captured and caged aboard the Ark along with other animals, the creature is poisoned by the expedition’s leader, Horace Trapp, for fomenting a revolt, and upon the ship’s return to England his body is stuffed, used as a towel holder in a Buckingham Palace washroom, stolen by Violet and Tobias, and handed down through generations as one of a number of stuffed animals and other objects in a wardrobe long forgotten in an attic. The wardrobe also contains the ghost of Charlotte Scrapie, confi ned there for a century and a half before being released.

196 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels Like Monkey’s Uncle, the novel is complex not only in structure but in mood and tone, mixing silliness with seriousness, detachment with poignancy. Buck’s tale is set in the midst of a twenty-fi rst-century “infertility crisis” in which the eggs of women living in Britain have become sterile while “pre-crisis” ova stored in the “National Egg Bank” are in short supply. The nineteenth-century stories are no less fanciful. If the novel works it does so for several reasons: readers adopt an anything-goes postmodern mindset as they negotiate shifts in tone and perspective, overlook the farfetched, and fi nd themselves pulled along by multiple mysteries, by humor and irreverence, by significant scientific and social issues, and by concern for Tobias and Violet, whose humanity prevails over the absurdity of their situations and of the novel in general. The neo-Victorianism of Ark Baby also lends interest. It resembles other novels that offer up a Victorian story clearly positioned in relation to a twentieth- or twenty-first-century story, narrative voice, or sensibility. In Jensen’s novel the contemporary tale focused on Buck de Saville is shaped by the converging Victorian ones, with direct historical links provided by the enduring ghost of Charlotte Scrapie, who foretells the future and becomes part of the future she foretells; by the living and stuffed versions of the Gentleman Monkey; and generally by a Victorian heritage influencing the present. The clash between science and religion likewise threads through the novel’s various historical and narrative layers as one of the ways it achieves unity despite its exuberant heterogeneity. Order also is produced by a moral structure in which most of the main characters, good and bad, end up getting their just deserts except perhaps for the morally lax Buck, who helps win a large cash reward by impregnating a pair of twins, descendants of Tobias and Violet, to produce the fi rst British natural non-in-vitro pregnancies in many years. The mutually reinforcing plots especially provide coherence despite the novel’s many complexities and seeming self-contradictions. Barbara L. Estrin unsnarls some of these by pursuing her insight that Jensen fi rst “pairs the scientific idea of evolution and its expectation for survival of the presumably fittest with an ancient plot, that of the foundling and its formula for the salvation of arguably the weakest,” and then counters the social status quo that these two narratives appear to support by “challenging the foundling formula . . . and by questioning the optimistic distinctions generated by the concept of evolution.” In the novel she also detects the story of Jonah and the whale that “like everything else in Ark Baby . . . sets in motion an opposite theory. . . .” (41, 42).1 For example, whereas the mythic figure of the foundling discovers his true identity as nobility, the seemingly socially unfit Tobias, expressing an “opposite theory,” will reveal in himself a far more valuable genetic and moral fitness. Ark Baby recognizes evolutionary darkness, including both the wholesale elimination throughout the natural world of the less fit and, in society, the falsely “optimistic” application of evolution by the powerful to rationalize their presumed superior fitness.

Victorians and Other Apes 197 Keeping in mind Estrin’s contention about the novel’s enactment of opposite theories entailing both positive and negative dimensions, especially in respect to evolution, I argue that Jensen tips the balance in favor of optimism about the parity and potential of all people through her connection of science with religion, itself a combination of the morally dark and light. Furthermore, the science-religion issue is a chief source of thematic and intellectual focus. On the one hand, the novel asserts the evolutionary relationship of humans to other primates and to the whole animal kingdom, and, on the other, it dramatizes resistance, religious and otherwise, to this inter-species connection that historically many people—including Robert FitzRoy—have found disturbing. Ark Baby intensifies this conflict by having the novel’s most sympathetic and important character, Tobias Phelps, personally experience the clash between science and religion that is brought to a head when, late in the novel, he discovers his biological father was the Gentleman Monkey; acceptance of his own origin and of the evolutionary origin of species coincide and destroy the biblical underpinnings of his religion and self-identity. One of the ways this confl ict plays out is through the implicit juxtaposition of ships. To the young Tobias the story of Noah’s ark testifies to the reality of divine creation and salvation; his reverence for the tale is similar to Covington’s in Mr. Darwin’s Shooter. But the story of the specimencollecting Ark ultimately supports the evolutionary development and interrelationships of life—as does Tobias, the “ark baby” of the title, who is conceived aboard the ship. More broadly, Ark Baby promotes a vision of a possible future in which nature, including all life forms, including our own evolutionary heritage, is embraced by human openness to wonder and appreciation—a sort of Darwinian romanticism consistent with George Levine’s concept of Darwinian re-enchantment. But personal and social crises, moral if not religious, are needed to overturn destructive and outworn ways of knowing, and long-term success is never assured.

IV The subject of evolution and the human-animal connection arises early in the twenty-fi rst-century portion of the novel. As result of the infertility crisis, many British women, frantic to provide substitutes for offspring and to assuage maternal cravings, adopt monkeys they dress in children’s clothes; in these respects Ark Baby resembles P. D. James’s earlier novel, The Children of Men (1992), which likewise concerns an infertility epidemic.2 Buck gets into trouble over a pinafore-wearing monkey named Giselle; jealous of his wife’s fi xation upon the animal, the adoptive father has Buck, without the wife’s permission, euthanize the animal, thereby earning the woman’s hostility and potential trouble with authorities. The adoption hysteria powerfully points to the matter of species kinship, the desire for human-like

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offspring offsetting the disinclination of many, sometimes intensified by religious fundamentalism, to acknowledge monkeys and apes as relatives. The tension between naturalistic and religious understandings emerges again as three radio commentators argue about the causes and significance of British infertility. A scientist fi nds the crisis unexceptional, connecting the fate of the British to that of other animals that have faced extinction: [I]t’s perhaps unfortunate it should have just hit our archipelago of islands, but in evolutionary terms, it’s not unusual for a disaster to be contained in this way. . . . Islands are well known for housing species that aren’t found elsewhere in the world. But by the same token, their populations are also prone to be wiped out in accidents such as this. Be they caused by rainfall, triggering a genetic malfunction, or something else which we don’t yet understand. (48; emphasis original) The explanation is flawed—not a particular problem in a novel comfortable with historical inaccuracy including multiple anachronisms—because British humans are not a species unto themselves that has evolved in isolation and been confined to Great Britain.3 The point, however, concerns historical contingency and the evolutionary role of extinction in which the appearance of some species entails the elimination of the less fit. A Darwinian connection is established via the implicit parallel between the British “archipelago” and the Galapagos with their unique forms of life observed by Darwin during the Beagle voyage. On the same radio program another authority offers a vague explanation for the crisis, claiming that “we reached an evolutionary cul-de-sac. . . . We’d gone as far as we possibly could, in terms of sophistication, civilization, humanity” (40). Biological and social development both have hit a wall, the consequence perhaps of some unknown, retrograde element among the forces that once produced evidence of progress. At the same time, implicitly, the crisis represents the decline of British civilization attended by a sense of belatedness in which the greatness of the past signifies the barrenness of the present. Giving this idea a religious explanation based on God’s wrath, a clergyman on the same broadcast responds by claiming the disaster occurred not “because we were so sophisticated, civilized, morally advanced, and humane as a species, but the very OPPOSITE. We didn’t honour what He had done for us. We, here in Britain. This once great nation.” Because a widespread flood had accompanied the millennium in Britain and ushered in the crisis, the religious commentator claims that “the Lord had become angry with the world, just as He had done once before. He’d sent the Flood then” (41). This reference to the Noah story, floods, and apocalyptic signs connects up with the nineteenth-century story, with the challenge Darwinism poses to Victorian religion and biblical literalism, and with Tobias Phelps’s involvement in a bizarre evolutionary drama. For example, the extinctions caused by Noah’s flood and those threatened by

Victorians and Other Apes 199 the infertility crisis resonate with that of the “Ape of Moridor,” the species of which Tobias’s father, captured and brought aboard the Ark, was the last representative. Although he dies, he first fathers Tobias as a hybrid result of the expedition leader’s experiment of putting the ape in a cage with Tobias’s kidnapped mother to see if they can breed. It is highly unlikely that a human and an ape could actually interbreed, or, even if possible, that it would result in a non-sterile offspring. But in Jensen’s literarily hybridized novel, a mixture of fact and fiction, past and present, the account of such biological hybridization allows her to explore the issue of the humananimal relationship in historical contexts.

V Tobias and his mid-Victorian story form the emotional center of the novel, and the intellectual one as well because in him is dramatized the showdown between evolutionary theory and the conventional religion of the day. Abandoned, naked, and bearing a wound on his tailbone, Tobias as a baby is discovered in the Thunder Spit church by Parson Phelps, who with his wife adopt and raise him in accordance with biblical literalism. His adoptive parents are loving and attentive, and Tobias rewards them by being a kind and invariably polite little boy—although his fi rst act as a baby, produced by fear and pain, is to bite Phelps with his already developed teeth. As a young child he also shows some unusual proficiency with language. He does not speak until his fi fth birthday, when he utters, as his fi rst words, “What a delicious-looking cake. . . . Please, dear Mother, would you kindly be so good as to cut me a slice” (52). Early on he shows a particular aptitude for tongue-twisters—“Betty Botter,” “Peter Piper,” and so forth—which earns him admiring attention. Tobias’s childhood difficulties result from unusual physical traits: he is small and hairy with a peculiar face, deformed feet with prehensile toes, and a perpetual infestation of fleas. Because of this strangeness most people shun or make fun of him. He faces much social affliction while growing up, and when things are difficult he poignantly seeks reassurance and distraction by repeating his tongue-twisters to himself. To his parents he is the gift of God, a miracle for a couple unable to have children—a prelude to the infertility crisis. It is only later in the novel, when bits and pieces of the Gentleman Monkey story begin to coalesce, that enough evidence surfaces to establish Tobias’s strange patrimony that explains many of his characteristics. These include his abdominal disorders—throughout his childhood thought the result of a tenacious tapeworm nicknamed Mildred—which in fact derive from his hereditary problem in digesting meat: the species of ape to which his father belonged ate only plants, a trait related to the novel’s interest in the Victorian vegetarian movement. His connection to the Gentleman Monkey also eventually explains his early possession of

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teeth and his other peculiar physical characteristics, along with his mild temperament, his late speech, and his wound, infl icted when his biological mother cut off his tail. Tobias’s tale/tail entails a complex of objects and events, conditions and trends that link up both dramatically and thematically. These include those already mentioned—fossils, floods, arks, primates, fertility/infertility, and vegetarianism—and another element, Tobias’s presumed umbilical cord. As a young man his one memento of his biological parents is a long, whitish object floating in a jar; at one point his needy and exploited mother, the unnamed ballerina-contortionist, shows up in Thunder Spit and gives the thing to Parson Phelps in return for money and a pledge to keep secret the boy’s lineage; Tobias witnesses the transaction from afar but does not know what it means or who the woman is. After Phelps becomes mentally incapacitated, the pickled artifact comes into the possession of Tobias, who believes, encouraged by others, that it is his umbilical cord. Having become attached to this symbol of connection to a lost, unknown mother, Tobias undergoes an identity crisis—although his identity had long been a source of anxiety because of his unknown origin and physical oddities—when the item turns out to be a severed tail. Eventually it will become a link to his father and his animal heritage. But both tail and the notion of an umbilical cord are significant, for together they signify Tobias as a hybrid, with traits of both parents, while connecting him to the Victorian scientific-religious controversy about origin of species and to his father’s ideas about fossils. A believer in natural theology, Parson Phelps throughout most of his career sees no contradiction between nature and religion; everywhere, as he tells Tobias, one beholds evidence of God’s “holy craftsmanship,” but most of all in mankind, his “masterpiece” (55, 56). To Phelps, fossils, rather than contradicting creationism and the biblical time scale, represent “God’s jokes”; they are “red herrings, planted by God, to trick geologists into believing they are right. . . . thereby wasting their time” (57). Phelps’s fanciful interpretation echoes the theory propagated by Philip Henry Gosse in Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot (1857) and discussed by his son, Edmund Gosse, in his autobiographical Father and Son (1907), the source of the portrayal of Oscar’s father in Peter Carey’s neo-Victorian novel Oscar and Lucinda. Whereas Carey’s character resembles the elder Gosse in being a naturalist as well as a clergyman, Tobias’s father is not a scientist, and his version of Gosse’s theory also is less exact, although it does mirror a popular misunderstanding of it. Also referenced in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Mr. Darwin’s Shooter, and Remarkable Creatures (161; 239; 92–93)—Fowles includes an explanatory footnote—Omphalos argues that God created fossils, not to fool people, but rather out of logical necessity, as part of his creation of the world with the same features, including the appearance of the same physical processes we see today. The author’s motivation was not only to

Victorians and Other Apes 201 reconcile religion with geology but to disprove evolutionary theory.4 The theological argument about whether or not Adam had an omphalos, a navel, was not new, but Gosse’s line of thought, leading him to conclude that Adam must have had one even though he had no mother, was original. Gosse premises that God fashioned all features of the Earth, inorganic and organic, in their fi nal forms, as the Bible indicates, but to do so everything in its initial condition had to bear the signs of cyclical history that would obtain henceforth—a pattern of origination, development, decline, and death but operating within an overall steady-state fashion. Focusing on fossils, however, Gosse’s detractors understood him to mean that an untrustworthy God was testing people’s faith by tricking them. Indeed, even if the newly created world had to assume the appearance of a nonexistent history, it remains murky why God needed to provide evidence of life forms that never existed since in Gosse’s view no new species ever appeared after their initial creation. But the navel is the element of Gosse’s beliefs that most directly pertains to Tobias, connecting the mystery of his origin to that of species. In the novel the omphalos, through association with Tobias’s putative umbilical cord, represents his early fundamentalist religion, derived from Parson Phelps, while the tail itself points to the evolutionary beliefs that would overturn not only his faith but that of Phelps. The Bible permeates Tobias’s childhood, offering him a sense of divine care that addresses his insecurities. For the young Tobias, living by the sea and loving its creatures, water is the stuff of God’s creation, which is why he says that “[o]f all the books of the Bible, that of Genesis was the one that I had always held most dear to my heart, and I felt its truth deeply.” Therefore he fervently repeats the phrases of Genesis 1: “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature,” “For the world was waste and void,” “darkness was upon on [sic] the face of the deep,” and “the spirit of God moved upon the waters” (56; emphasis original). A picture of Noah and his ark, with the benevolent face of God peering down on them, hangs upon his bedroom wall, and rather than attesting to God’s destructive power manifested in water, in Tobias’s sentimental interpretation it speaks solely of His care for life and his gift of salvation (87). But Queen Victoria’s Ark supports a different idea of origins, for there the Gentleman Monkey—his kindly ways having won the love of Tobias’s mother— impregnates her and thereby establishes the close evolutionary relationship between humans and apes. When The Origin of Species appears in 1859, Parson Phelps and his son both laugh at it, and the elder correctly explains that “[t]he idea that we were descended from monkeys and apes was not new . . . but this was the fi rst time it had been voiced with such apparent authority.” Tobias states that “the whole Christian world—or that part of it that Parson Phelps and I represented, i.e. the humble common clergy of the land—was still weary and frustrated from all the geology battles over fossils, but we rose up against” Darwin’s theory (139). To show his disdain, but also in recognition of the

202 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels theory’s potency, during a church service Phelps rips up a copy of the Origin and declares to his congregation, “This is my message to all heretics.” At this point in the story Tobias is in full agreement, and he and Phelps convivially spend “many hours pouring over Darwin’s profane tome” but with increasing apprehension over Darwin’s “heresies” (140, 141)—and with the result of contributing to both Tobias’s and Phelps’s eventual conversion to evolutionary theory. Like other neo-Victorian novels that attend to Darwinism, Ark Baby presents it as a major and revolutionary challenge to late-Victorian religious faith, and, as mentioned in Chapter 1, perhaps even more so than was actually the case in the late nineteenth century.5 As Phelps says, prior to the Origin evolution was not a new idea. Nevertheless, exaggeration serves not only as an important comic element of Jensen’s novel, but also as a way of showing the traumatic effect that Darwinism had, if not on all orthodox believers, at least on those believers whose intellectual honesty made it hard to dismiss its explanatory power despite its contradiction of religious dogma. Its effect on Parson Phelps and Tobias is sad, amusing, and ultimately hopeful. After receiving, from Tobias’s mother, the preserved tail and knowledge of the father’s identity, Phelps suffers a nervous breakdown and descends into muttering incoherence. Knowledge that Tobias’s biological father was an ape not only horrifies him in itself, it destroys his faith by suggesting that Darwin was right about the genealogical relationship between apes and humans since interbreeding produced an offspring. His world turned upside down—he once had “railed against the very idea of our origins being anything other than stated in the Bible” (326)—Phelps renounces Tobias and is committed to the “Fishforth Sanatorium for the Spiritually Disturbed.” With its evolutionarily resonant name of “Fishforth” reinforced by its location by the sea, the asylum is dedicated either to restoring the faith of clergymen “whose beliefs . . . have been shattered by Darwinism” or to facilitate personal evolutions taking them beyond conventional belief into a dynamic state of openness and exploration: “All depending,” says the Principal, a former inmate himself, “on whether you choose to cling to the solid rock of your already established belief, or to take that leap of imagination and faith that will hurl you into an abyss of chaos and wonder” (217, 217–18). Chaos describes not only the condition of those who have been forced to abandon old ego-reinforcing structures of belief, but also a realm of uncontrollable possibilities—of openness to the wonder of what is—that might grow out of the abandonment. Despite his spiritual rigidity, Parson Phelps has possessed a sense of this realm from the fi rst. Although his intention is to warn against worldly entertainments, he nevertheless, before his collapse, assures his congregation that “[t]he magic is here, in Nature and in our hearts” (143). The novel moves, via Darwin-induced crises of faith, toward the magic that lies on the other side of insecurity—toward a human and humane relationship with a miraculous nature within and without.

Victorians and Other Apes 203 Although critiquing Ark Baby might seem a matter of taking it more seriously than it takes itself, the novel promotes this vision, a moral core to its story consistent with both its social satire and its sympathy for its chief Victorian characters as they attempt to reconstruct identities on a new basis.

VI After a medical student identifies the preserved item in the jar as not an umbilical cord but rather a tail, Tobias, already devastated by Phelps’s descent into madness, sets off to discover the truth about his origins. Although timid by nature and afraid of what he will fi nd, he is committed to this search; “What I needed was the truth,” he asserts (258). His quest takes him to London, a fearful place removed from the small-town life he knows and the sea he loves; to the British Museum, where he confronts stuffed, clothes-wearing animals lent from the Queen’s collection; and fi nally, as he bears the jar and tail, to Ivanhoe Scrapie, the royal taxidermist and expert in exotic species who might be able to help him. Tobias quickly interests the other in his story and is subjected to questions and a physical examination. Scrapie recognizes similarities between Tobias and his father, whom he had stuffed; sees the son’s mutilated tailbone and bottled tail; learns of the young man’s unknown parentage and that he was born during the year of the Ark’s return; and, being an evolutionist, applies his knowledge that species closely related genealogically sometimes successfully interbreed. Thus the taxidermist quickly seizes upon Tobias as the evidence of what he will call “a new theory of evolution” (293; emphasis original), which he hopes will bring him fame equal to Darwin’s. Scrapie’s theory is a reminder that natural selection, Darwin’s explanation for evolution, was far from being universally accepted by scientists; for example, in the latter part of the century neo-Lamarckism, with its optimistic alternative to natural selection, seems to have attracted as many adherents as did strict Darwinism.6 Scrapie, however, is not motivated by rejection of natural selection but rather by the desire for fame and by envy of Darwin— attitudes, no doubt, of many of Darwin’s actual scientific opponents. Scrapie develops his theory, a “form of natural selection,” in front of an increasingly alarmed Tobias. First, Scrapie notes the unpredictability of evolutionarily produced morphological changes, citing Darwin’s “principle of correlation, by which many strange deviations of structure are tied together, so that a change in one part often leads to other changes of a quite unexpected nature” (281; emphasis original). Next he advances a hypothesis: “A human mates with another species of primate. . . . And creates a new breed of human-like primate.” At this point Tobias gulps. The taxidermist then recognizes his theory’s potential to answer persistent objections—ones that in reality vexed Darwin—to evolution by natural selection. One is the apparently sudden appearance of new species in the

204 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels fossil record. Seemingly a contradiction of Darwinian gradualism, this phenomenon was often used to support a form of special creation—the idea that God produced new species at various intervals throughout the earth’s history. “Can the unaccountable leaps and bounds of our evolutionary path be explained by the occasional injection of the blood of other species into the veins of some creatures?” Scrapie rhetorically asks (283). Finally he addresses another supposed flaw in Darwinian theory, that there had not been enough time, according to nineteenth-century estimates of the earth’s age, for evolution to have occurred as Darwin describes: “To get from a fish to a man takes longer than it should. It doesn’t work on paper, so there have to be sudden changes, not just gradual ones” (283–84). In the Origin Darwin strove to resolve the problems of sudden emergences and of insufficient time broached by Scrapie.7 In response to Scrapie’s theorizing, Tobias’s crisis of faith reaches an excruciating climax as he accepts the truth of his own beginnings while exchanging the biblical tale of origins for an evolutionary one: “So, I thought miserably, Genesis was a lie. And evolution was a fact. But its mechanics . . . were not quite as Mr Darwin thought. It progressed at times in great magical leaps. And I was proof of it. A mutant, an aberration, a misbegot” (284). But Tobias then begins to sense the possibility of his own specialness, based upon his understanding that in producing changes of “quite unexpected nature” evolution yields originality and sometimes, relative to environmental conditions, improvement. The randomness implicit in Darwinian evolution bothered many people as much as the human-animal connection, but Tobias responds with puzzled wonderment to “a new, chaotic higgledy-piggledyness that defied belief and astonished the heavens. And I, Tobias Phelps, was part of this crazy hotchpotch of nature called evolution. But was I a victim or a pioneer?” “I hung my head in an unfathomable mixture of pride and shame,” he says (285). But gradually pride will triumph, and a major part of his self-acceptance will be his acceptance by Scrapie’s daughter, Violet. Tobias sees Violet when he fi rst knocks on Scrapie’s door and she looks down out of the window to see who is there; he looks up and sees her wearing nothing but her corset, and it is mutual love at fi rst sight. Violet is enormous—nearly 250 pounds—but Tobias, who stands 5’2,” instantly fi nds her “magnificent”—as he does once more, following his examination and a nerve-calming injection of laudanum administered by Scrapie, when he awakens to find her caring for him (269, 289). Caring is central to Violet’s nature, implicit in the anti-anthropocentrism that underlies her commitment to vegetarianism. She also represents reproductive potential, with her “gigantic hips” and breasts “[e]ach . . . the size of a human baby” (265). For Tobias she means hope for a bountiful future. Like Tobias, Violet has had to overcome liabilities, including a cold, dismissive father who nicknames her “Vile” and a mother, embarrassed by her daughter’s bulk, who insists upon her wearing a monstrous corset.

Victorians and Other Apes 205 The garment relates to the concern, among novelistic and other commentators on nineteenth-century culture, upon Victorian repression of the human body and its instincts and of women in particular. In Violet’s case this theme raises the issue of corset stays and their origin in whalebone. Violet vividly imagines the horrific scenes of whale slaughter and rendering that produce supports for hats, bodices, and corsets (263–64). But offsetting this theme of violence and repression are Violet’s humanity, individualism, and self-expression that eventually lead her to vegetarianism and the salvation of Tobias. A lover of cookery and cuisine, Violet had grown up helping the Scrapies’ chef—Jacques-Yves Cabillaud (“Codfish”), supposedly once a cook aboard the Beagle—as he prepared exotic dishes made from various meats left over from Scrapie’s taxidermy. But in reaction she turns against meat eating after she encounters the vegetarian activist Henry Salt, an actual historical figure, who pronounces that “anthropomorphism makes cannibals of us all. . . . The only solution is to abandon our lust for the carcass, and eat herbs of the field!” (157). She had helped Cabillaud produce his definitive cookbook on exotic meats, Cuisine Zoologique: une philosophie de la viande, but after her conversion she embarks on her own cookbook, The Fleshless Chef, which will prove an even greater success than Cabillaud’s popular tome. Violet’s concern for animal rights and rejection of a man-animal dichotomy contradict not only Parson Phelps’s contention that animals were “designed by God to serve man in a myriad ways” and Cabillaud’s justification for carnivorism that “animals have no human rights” (174, 161), but also the rationale that lies behind the plan of Horace Trapp, leader of the Ark expedition, to breed the Gentleman Monkey with Tobias’s mother. Trapp had hoped to profit from producing “a new kind of slave . . . not completely human”—a species “with no rights” (319). Living down to the meaning of his name—scrapie is a degenerative disease of goats and sheep—Scrapie had adopted a similar idea in his plan for Tobias: unbeknownst to the young man, who initially looks upon him as his savior, a god-like father figure, the taxidermist plans to kill, stuff, and present him to the Zoological Society (315), actions justified because Tobias is not really or fully human. Scrapie inadvertently refers to him as “my fine young specimen” (304). Ark Baby exposes the distinctions, defi nitions, and classifications that support inhumanity; like nearly all of the novels discussed in this book, Jensen’s novel is intensely concerned with ethics. Wanting to be honest with Violet about his newly discovered source of shame but deathly afraid of rejection, Tobias tries to tell her of his biological father, fi nds he cannot speak the fearful words, and so begins to write it out but is interrupted by Scrapie’s abrupt entrance, leaving the intended message without its fi nal two letters. Thus when Violet reads the note it says, “My father was a monk” (314). The implicit monk/monkey pun—the excited Tobias confuses apes with monkeys—indicates not only the denial of humans’ evolutionary heritage still practiced by fundamentalists, but

206 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels also the ascetic denial or subjection of humans’ animal nature exercised throughout history. Heir of the Puritanical tradition and of Parson Phelps, who places marbles in his shoes to mortify his flesh, Tobias grows up ashamed of his body and its appetites. In response to Scrapie’s physical examination, Tobias says, “I rarely have occasion to be entirely naked, sir. Even when alone. . . . My parents—discouraged nakedness” (272). When asked how he was raised, Tobias responds, “In a Christian manner, sir . . . Cleanliness, reading, self-improvement and piety were encouraged. Indulgences of the flesh, nakedness and childish play were not. A traditional English upbringing, sir” (275). His upbringing had produced guilt over his adolescent habit of masturbation, which he was unable to break, and contributed to the shame he feels over his lust for bananas, at that time a novel and exotic fruit he cannot forget nor resist after his fi rst taste. Both Tobias’s motivation to deny his animal nature and his inability to do so are intense. Upon fi rst learning the truth of his origins, Tobias makes two disparaging self-assessments: he is “a freak cross-breed” with “a lowly status on the evolutionary ladder” (284, 294). That evolution can be described as a ladder was a favorite notion of late Victorians, who could apply the idea not only to humans being “higher”—in some ultimate sense more “evolved”— than other species, but to Caucasians being higher than other races, or even to Anglo-Saxons being higher than other ethnicities; the racist Potter in English Passengers is called to mind.8 But the position of a cross-breed upon the ladder is unclear. Scrapie quotes Darwin’s uncertainty about whether multiple crosses between individual members of different varieties or subspecies—not between species as Scrapie (and perhaps Jensen) apparently believe—would lead to stable, heritable change or to reversion of descendants to the form of one or other of the interbred pair (Ark 282–83).9 Scrapie decides upon the former possibility in concluding that hybridism had been the engine of rapid evolutionary developments. But he never considers that Tobias might represent a step “up” on the evolutionary ladder, in the relativistic sense that individual variation can enhance survival fitness in particular environments. To Scrapie the young man is a scientific oddity, whereas in fact, although Jensen does not use the term, Tobias is “a hopeful monster” representing, not the past, something to stuff and preserve, but a future alive with possibilities. Once Buck de Saville begins to understand the significance of the stuffed Gentleman Monkey and Scrapie’s theory, he ruminates on evolutionary matters and in passing refers to Stephen Jay Gould (255). Among much else, Gould is noted for calling attention to Richard Goldschmidt’s theory of “the hopeful monster,” already referenced in Chapter 5. Goldschmidt, a mid-twentieth-century geneticist, believed a new species could rapidly emerge via macromutations—that on rare occasions sudden, pronounced genetic changes would produce, not simply monsters destined to disappear without evolutionary impact, but “monsters” with characteristics offering

Victorians and Other Apes 207 sufficient survival value to produce new species. This process Goldschmidt believed produced evolutionary change, which he contended happens rapidly in accordance with the discontinuity of the fossil record in which new species seem to abruptly appear. Although Gould rejected the idea of the hopeful monster—of evolution happening that quickly—he and his colleague Niles Eldredge argued, in their well-known hypothesis of punctuated equilibrium, that evolution indeed occurs in relatively rapid events of speciation punctuating long periods of species stability.10 With Scrapie’s theory, Ark Baby picks up on such challenges to Darwinian gradualism while adding the element of hybridism. Like some other neo-Victorian treatments of evolution, the novel’s scientific provenance is as much late twentieth century as nineteenth. While Jensen’s application of evolutionary theory is far from exacting, it offers a mechanism for Tobias’s ultimate evolutionary success, in that his innovative genes eventually will help end the British infertility crisis. The one-time ark baby will, like Noah’s ark, become the vehicle of salvation. Ark Baby, however, is equally concerned with reverence and care for all life that Tobias comes to represent. This attitude, coupled with his intelligence, an exceptional mate, and newfound confidence, also qualify him as “hopeful monster.”

VII Shortly before Tobias gains his true identity and loses his religious faith, Ark Baby returns to the subject of fossils when Scrapie asks, “Have you ever seen a fossil, Mr Phelps?” Tobias responds that he has—Thunder Spit possesses a “fossil heritage” (71)—and although his piety is already beginning to unravel, he defensively repeats Parson Phelps’s belief that fossils are “God’s jokes” and “clearly the Lord’s doing, and evidence of His grand design.” Once Scrapie explains his visitor’s evolutionary significance, however, Tobias wonders if he himself qualifies as one of God’s jokes (281, 285). With no God in the picture Tobias’s existence cannot designedly be a joke; rather, if he is a joke, it is because he signifies that there is no design in “the crazy hotchpotch of nature called evolution” (285). Tobias might seem a joke because there is no meaning to his appearance in the world or to his peculiarities, no significance of the sort he had sought all his life and is unlikely to fi nd because at this point he seems to have no future. To Scrapie, who plans to poison and stuff Tobias, the man-ape hybrid is akin to a fossil, which in common understanding represents a creature destined to disappear, a dead end, since the vast majority of fossils represent extinct species. But myriad forces make the path of the future unknowable for a phenomenon as complex as evolution. Because the unfolding of historical processes is rife with uncertainty, Tobias implausibly will end up signifying, not extinction, but hereditary continuity and the source of a new variety of primate generated by hybridism.

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Like some other neo-Victorian responses to Darwinism, Ark Baby attends to historical contingency and unpredictability, applying these factors to both human history and the history of life. Although historians typically emphasize trends, organizing principles, and causes and effects, Jensen’s novel also focuses on how events frequently happen in unforeseeable, random fashion. Scrapie explains that evolution often entails “changes of a quite unexpected nature”; the hysteria of infertility is described as “circumstances [that] were unprecedented”; and Tobias’s contortionist mother, concerning her relationship with the Gentleman Monkey, understatedly writes that unlikely occurrences aboard the Ark happened because “Circumstances woz most particular” (281, 240, 239, 269, emphases original). The most dramatic indices of unpredictability that affect humans and other forms of life are widespread disasters, whether caused by humans or nature, of which “the Millennium event”—the flood somehow associated with the ensuing infertility plague—constitutes the novel’s central example. The flood is akin to the meteor strike thought to have ended the age of dinosaurs and to other extermination events in the history of the earth. The unpredictability of the future is why the Gentleman Monkey’s tail is twisted like a question mark. The idea of unpredictability does not contradict the presence of Charlotte Scrapie as a prognosticative disembodied spirit who hovers about her husband and daughter and shares with them accurate glimpses of life in the twenty-fi rst century, a time she will one day inhabit when released from the wardrobe. One of many implausible or impossible elements on which the narrative hinges, the fanciful ghost suggests that predicting the future, except in the most general terms, would require supernatural agency, which the novel dismisses with its rejection of Tobias’s and his father’s God; but it also suggests that the past always persists, ghost-like, in the present. Although Charlotte Scrapie and her ability to visualize the future might seem to contradict the novel’s evolution-based acceptance of historical contingency, she serves to help deconstruct the divide between, one the one hand, the objective, scientific, and rational and, on the other, the farfetched or outright miraculous. This collapsing of boundaries is the essence of magic realism. But ultimately the Ark Baby’s allegiance is to the world in which we live, with the novel’s excesses working to remind readers of the potential wonder, necessarily intermixed with destruction and moral darkness, of the here and now. Tobias’s contortionist-ballerina mother performs in “The Travelling Fair of Danger and Delight,” and Jensen’s novel stresses that the experience of delight requires openness to all of life’s features, including danger, and most importantly the danger involved in taking risks in the service of good or growth. This implication grows out of Tobias’s story and his effort to learn the truth of the past that will allow him to change the future for the better. Tobias’s experiences confi rm that everyday reality is no less miraculous, no less full of potential, than a world inhabited by spirits.

Victorians and Other Apes 209 While the unfolding of historical events and their interactions cannot be predicted with certainty, they sometimes can be largely comprehended in retrospect, as is the case with the study of evolutionary history. Similar to other neo-Victorian novels, including The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Possession, and Ever After, in which contemporary narrators or characters struggle to re-create the past, Ark Baby depicts the attempts of twenty-fi rst-century protagonists to learn about the nineteenth-century people and occurrences that have affected them—much as Tobias struggles to learn the truth of his background. History is not totally recoverable, since there are always complexities and gaps of knowledge that lend themselves to multiple interpretations and speculations rather than established fact; hence the distinction between serious historiography and even wild fiction like that of Ark Baby is not absolute but rather a matter of degree, although the degree of difference between the two can be very large. When Tobias and Charlotte’s descendants, the twins Rose and Blanche Ball, who with Buck’s help eventually conceive and end the infertility crisis, engage in genealogical research into the history of their family they locate the local marriage registry but fi nd that much of the ink is smeared from the effects of the nineteenth-century flood that had washed over Thunder Spit. “That’s history for you,” an acquaintance comments (136). Nevertheless, the twins, who study genealogy because they have heard that Americans will pay big money to trace family histories, are able to trace their ancestry to Tobias. It is the historical sleuthing of Buck, however, who has obtained the stuffed Gentleman Monkey from Rose and Blanche’s parents, that leads to knowledge of the artifact’s significance. Buck recognizes a picture of the Gentleman Monkey in Scrapie’s manuscript, also found in the attic wardrobe along with stuffed creatures, then sets off for London to uncover its background. Finally he learns the truth about Tobias’s identity and also about strange characteristics of Rose and Blanche, who in a couple respects have reverted to those of Tobias; Buck now understands their frequent depilation sessions and their reluctance to uncover their feet. The novel’s stance on history is that it is generally unforeseeable, that it is partially but incompletely recoverable, and that it continually influences the present in ways both known and unknown. Therefore the Victorian era, while elusive, is not conceived as dead and gone any more than are Tobias’s genes or Charlotte Scrapie. When the artifact laden wardrobe is opened, the Ball home becomes “invaded by Victoriana,” including the ghost of Charlotte the one-time spiritualist (165). The novel itself, like other neoVictorian novels and like the wardrobe, is filled with Victoriana—people, objects, trends, events—phenomena sometimes clearly relevant to the present.11 In Thunder Spit the persistence of the past appears in the ancient family names that have survived and in vestiges of old traditions. And the Millennium flood elicits memory of the Great Flood of 1858, which engulfed Tobias and Parson Phelps in the parish church, obliterated parts

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of the marriage registry, and presaged the Origin of Species, published the next year, and the picture of nature it fosters. The Origin offers a contradictory two-fold picture of nature, which, on the one hand, is beautiful in its intricate adaptations, creativity, and variety, and, on the other, is filled with random, unpredictable acts of destruction and with morally repugnant instances of the struggle, predation, and death that accompany natural selection and produce evolution. “Nature red in tooth and claw,” Cabillaud thinks to himself as, in the face of Violet’s vegetarianism, he justifies meat-eating by citing Darwin and the cruelty of animal and insect predators. Tobias tells that denizens of Thunder Spit, living near the sea and for generations having wrested their livelihoods from it, believe “there were two types of Nature: the Nature man could vanquish, and the Nature that vanquished him. . . . The other nature always remained: wild Nature, the Nature we couldn’t guard against; the Nature that is always erupting and rattling around us.” Tobias cites winds, dangerous animals, “potato blight and the centipedes and lice and silverfish in the sacks of corn, and the fleas that attacked us, and the parasites we bore within” (54–55). Scrapie makes the same point but applies it to justify his plan to kill Tobias: “Nature’s cruel, you know, young man,” he tells his prospective victim, “eyeing [him] in a strange way” (279). Scrapie raises the issue of social Darwinism, or the fallacy—famously and forcefully attacked by Thomas Huxley in his lecture and essay “Evolution and Ethics” (1896)—that nature, being immoral or at best amoral, should not be used as a model or rationalization for human behavior—in philosophical terms, that “ought” cannot logically be derived from “is.” Self-servers like Scrapie and Buck, who plans to claim Scrapie’s theory as his own, in their separate centuries pursue their ends in accordance with such rationalization. Human nature does not change, but Darwinism twisted into an ideology of power provided new justification for inhumanity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Past and present come together as Buck’s and Tobias’s quests for truth parallel one another, with the novel cross-cutting between the two and reaching nearly simultaneous crescendos. Having, like Tobias, discovered in a trip to London the meaning of the Gentleman Monkey, Buck returns to Thunder Spit convinced of the stuffed specimen’s great value and is appalled to learn that the twins have given it away and that it is being burned as part of a Guy Fawkes celebration. He rushes to the bonfire only to witness the Gentleman Monkey going up in flames. This action resonates and narratively coincides with a nineteenth-century festivity, a gala entertainment entitled the “Celebration of Evolution Banquet,” which leads to Tobias and Charlotte’s escape, along with the stuffed ape, into a hopeful future. The burning of the Gentleman Monkey represents a release, not from the influence of the past, but from its constrictions founded upon misreadings of reality. The Celebration of Evolution Banquet is Ark Baby’s climax as well as its most extravagant flight of comic fancy, both because the idea of the

Victorians and Other Apes 211 generally conservative Queen Victoria honoring Darwin and his theory at a Buckingham Palace banquet is absurd, and because the affair involves an attraction called “the Evolutionary Time-Bomb”—“a masterpiece of cuisine designed and constructed by Her Majesty’s head chef, Monsieur Jacques-Yves Cabillaud” (306), who had gone to work for the Queen after quitting Scrapie’s employment.12 The various layers of the Time-Bomb, which the Queen herself sequentially slices open, consist of “an entire roast elephant” served on an enormous oyster shell and within containing a roasted zebra, inside of which is a roasted pig that, when it is cut into, reveals a performer—Tobias’s mother—who pops out, dances, and then performs a contortion on the elephant’s head. In the midst of excitement elicited by Cabillaud’s production, Scrapie tries to interest the guest of honor, Darwin, in his theory; Tobias reunites with his mother and learns about the circumstances surrounding his conception; Violet discovers her father’s deadly plan for Tobias and warns him; Tobias discovers the Gentleman Monkey in the palace washroom; and, with Cabillaud’s help, Tobias and Violet escape through the kitchen with Tobias’s stuffed father, now freed from his demeaning function of holding towels.13 Meanwhile, in the twenty-fi rst century, Buck loses the Gentleman Monkey but learns he has become the father of two sets of twins, born simultaneously, which the ghost of Charlotte Scrapie identifies as “two miniature Violets, and two miniature Tobiases.”14 Buck watches his “offspring clinging tightly to their mothers with their perfect little hand-like feet. And as they suckled, their four little tails, curled like question marks, twitched in happiness” (334, 335). Despite their reversions, the babies intimate hope for the future because their genes will reestablish British fertility, and perhaps there is hope for Buck as well, since his last contribution to the narrative is his apparent recognition of the happiness of his four offspring. The Victorian portion of the happy ending continues with Parson Phelps regaining his sanity. Earlier, at Violet’s urging, Tobias had written to him to ask for acceptance, ending his letter with the appeal, “If you cannot love me as your foster-child, then love me as one of God’s creatures” (295; emphasis original). Tobias has learned to love himself, and to do so with pride in both his commonality and his uniqueness in relation to other creatures of the earth. Phelps accepts Tobias in the same spirit, and he and adoptive son reunite in an emotional scene. When Phelps returns to his ministry, he no longer preaches the literal truth of the Bible but rather the wonder of nature and its creatures. “And as I sit in the front pew with Violet,” Tobias says, “my mind wanders to the ocean, my old childhood toybox full of miracles. The mackerel flashing and jumping in the sunlight; the herring gulls wheeling in the sky. And there I see a Nature that is neither good nor bad, but its own pure self” (342). The novel ends with Tobias’s thoughts of a daughter-to-be and his affi rmation that “a boundless hope floods my heart” (343).

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The metaphor “floods” is suggestive: floods bring Tobias to his foster parents and somehow participate in creating the infertility crisis that Tobias’s genes resolve. A literal biblical flood and biblical miracles in general are no longer viable; the novel employs the incredible to reject the incredible. The novel’s culminating endorsement of Tobias’s hope, however, is reasonable, and not only because his hope manifests itself in a daughter and her descendants who will undo the destructive consequences of a flood. Hope often is self-fulfi lling prophecy, as is hopelessness. Tobias’s crisis of faith means the temporary hopelessness of losing his Genesis-centered Christianity, the pain of which the novel fully conveys, but he gains in its stead an idea of nature that incorporates qualities often associated with religion: not only hope but reverence, wonderment, and a sense of unity and coidentity with all life. These qualities, along with awareness of natural and human cruelty, had long been part of Tobias’s moral understanding, but he doubted his worthiness to withstand the darkness and share the bounty. His self-acceptance, reinforced by Charlotte, strengthens his allegiance to the world, producing faith in himself and in the future. The happy ending is qualified, however, by the novel’s recognition of how easily humans and even the whole human race can come to doom through natural means, their own excesses, or the two in tandem; the future indeed is open.15

9

Conclusion Confessing a Murder and Love and the Platypus

I The introductory chapter describes the Victorian novel Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Why do a number of neo-Victorian novels take the science-religion relationship, including crises of religious faith, as seriously as did the author of Robert Elsmere and the Victorian readers who made it a best seller? Simple commitment to historical reality helps explain part of this similarity: to some degree these novels emphasize what Victorians emphasized. But with many Victorian themes available, why do some of the most accomplished neo-Victorian works of fiction, growing out of a largely secularist culture, choose not only to record but to emphasize this matter? The introduction to this book speculates that in recent years authors and readers often feel confused by a world even more fragmented and fastchanging than the Victorian one—a modern or postmodern landscape without clear signposts. Unclear or unstable patterns of societal understanding and behavior make it harder for people to know themselves in relation to external references and therefore to act with confidence upon a basis of selfknowledge. In contrast, Victorianism as conventionally understood might seem an attractive model of stability and solidarity informed by traditional values. The Victorian world might appear even more attractive if it can be understood as another time of change and uncertainty but one that nevertheless posits an appealing model of commitment and purpose, of taking serious things seriously, as many Victorians did religious faith and doubt. Victorian science and religion underscore the neo-Victorian attraction to the nineteenth century because they are intensely involved with historical continuity and change, with social problems and solutions, and with meaning and values. In their re-imagined Victorian context these two ways of knowing might seem to address ongoing social problems or, even when viewed in terms of mutual antagonism or crises of faith, at least to highlight basic human needs and concerns. Neo-Victorian novels focused on science and religion offer a jumbled mix of attractions depending on authors’ and readers’ dispositions: positive models, instructive parallels, and examples of what to avoid; but rarely, unlike many historical novels including most

214 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels of those set in the nineteenth century, do they encourage a simple escape into either other people’s problems or an imaginary better world. These novels do little to support the notion that today is fundamentally different from the nineteenth century or that one is better than the other. The basic choices that cause some nineteenth-century characters to secure more satisfactory lives and others to fail in doing so are available to readers. This chapter sums up Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels and illustrates the appeal of the texts it discusses by considering two novels that integrate many of the themes and literary approaches found in neo-Victorian novels involving science and religion. Nicholas Drayson’s Confessing a Murder (2002) and Love and the Platypus (2008) encompass science, religion, crises of faith, ethics, Darwin and evolutionary theory, wonderment at the beauty and intricacies of nature, and the process of achieving integrated self-identities.1

II The identity of the main character and narrator of Confessing a Murder, however, is problematic because, fi rst, it is unclear if he can be believed to have existed at all, and, second, even if he is who the narrative claims, his identity is established from early in the novel as fi xed and not particularly admirable. Without revealing his name, he tells of his life in a manuscript that, along with a publisher’s introduction and an editor’s notes, becomes a book after being mysteriously discovered in the twentieth century. The introduction explains what is known about the autobiographical document and supplies reasons for believing it might be legitimate. The editor’s name is given as Nicholas Drayson. As with other accomplished novels with fictional editors—James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1836) are important nineteenth-century precursors—Drayson’s text gains depth from its metafictional approach. If such a novel’s story is interesting and its critical apparatus clever, then it merely provokes a double suspension of disbelief, of which most readers are capable, and more reason for appreciation as the novel heightens its fictional claim to non-fictionality. Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things, which later I will touch on briefly, employs a similar narrative setup. Confessing a Murder augments its creativity with a narrative that cleverly supports the narrator’s assertion that he had been a close friend of Charles Darwin, knew his family well, had interacted with Alfred Wallace (1823–1913), and was the actual originator of the theory of evolution by natural selection credited to Darwin and advanced also by Wallace. The narrator tells how as a young man he works out the theory for himself and then shares it with Darwin, who “[d]espite his desperate attempt to cling on to Christian doctrine,” has to listen (155). If he is to be believed, it is the narrator’s enthusiasm for natural history that fi rst inspires Darwin with

Conclusion 215 the same passion. Furthermore, the novel’s employment of neo-Victorian retroactive knowledge allows the story teller to claim discovery of the laws of hereditary transmission—the basis of genetics—and to anticipate the twentieth-century theory of continental drift (161–63, 159). He provides largely plausible reasons for why he is unknown to history and, in particular, absent from Darwin’s writings despite their friendship and his enormous contribution to Darwin’s career. His narrative reaches back to his childhood. As a boy, an orphan of unknown parentage supported by mysterious trustees, he is sent to a boarding school where he is befriended by Darwin and his brother, Erasmus, and soon becomes friendly with their family, whom he periodically visits from that time into early manhood. He also describes sexual relations with Erasmus at school and later with Charles’s cousin and eventual wife, Emma Wedgewood, daughter of Charles’s uncle Josiah. He keeps these liaisons well hidden, along with the fact that he is interested in Emma because of her money, but after Darwin senior and her father learn he wants to marry her they use their wealth and influence to buy him off and banish him from England. Eventually his trustees are revealed to him as, in fact, Charles’s father and uncle. Furthermore, Josiah Wedgewood turns out to be his father, making Emma his half-sister and himself ineligible for becoming her husband—although his bastardy and her family’s intention that she marry Charles might have been sufficient. Thus she is available for Darwin, who knows nothing about these matters, upon his return from the Beagle voyage. The story is a brazen exercise in neo-Victorian revisionism that reduces Darwin, as scientist and husband, to a genial unoriginal thinker and a dupe. The narrator does not see it that way; he claims to remember his friend fondly, shows no uneasiness about his own behavior, and says he is happy for Darwin when the Origin of Species appears, even though the basic ideas are all his, and pleased that Thomas Huxley, whom he had met in South Africa, is actively defending the book. Darwin, however, is not present during most of the novel. The bulk of the story takes place on an island. In his tale the narrator becomes wealthy through trade in Australia and the East Indies, pursues studies in natural history, meets Alfred Wallace, and falls in love with Charlie, Wallace’s young assistant, to whom he tells his theory of evolution. Some years later he hires a boat and crew to take him and Charlie on a scientific expedition that causes the two of them, following a mutiny, to be stranded on an uncharted tropical island, left with supplies but with no way to leave. It is there that the narrator supposedly writes his manuscript. Eventually he murders Charlie, not only because his erstwhile friend and lover had become mean and dangerous, but because Charlie revealed that years before he told the narrator’s theory of evolution to Wallace, whose revelation of it to Darwin panicked him into writing and publishing the Origin in order to assert priority. Darwin’s reaction to the publication of the Origin introduces another revision of history and a further reduction of Darwin.

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In his autobiography Darwin describes a gradual and relatively painless loss of religion, but the narrator of Confessing a Murder tells it differently. Holding his childhood friend responsible for causing him to violate religion by publishing his book, Darwin returns the other man’s letters accompanied by his own letter that its recipient paraphrases: “[T]here are some things which should not be challenged. . . . he had come to realize, with the loving help of his dear wife, that foremost among these was the word of God. But now he had been forced to publish, and who had acted the part of Satan’s agent. . . . It could only have been me who told Wallace of the Theory. . . . [Darwin] had no alternative but to hold me responsible for ruining his life” (229). We are to believe that without Wallace’s agency Darwin never would have gotten around to publishing, having already sat on his theory for almost twenty years, and it is historically true that at the very least he would not have published nearly as soon without Wallace as motivation. 2 The narrator confusedly suggests a number of possible motives for killing Charlie, the main one being that he “had to die” for stealing “the Theory,” giving it to Wallace, and provoking Darwin into publication and anguish. The narrator’s “confessing a murder” ends with rhetorical questions to Darwin which finally admit his own involvement: “Did I take away your quiet life . . . or worse, did I take the life of your God? Was it a gift, or was it a curse?” (279, 280). At the end of the novel the writer feels death approaching, and afterward, according to the editor’s investigations, the island blew up in the same volcanic disruption that exploded Krakatau in 1883, thereby destroying evidence of the manuscript’s authenticity that descriptions of the island and its unique forms of life would have provided. How the document got off the island is unknown. The title the fictitious publisher gives the autobiography, Confessing a Murder, relates to Charlie’s fate but to Darwin as well; it is taken from an actual letter Darwin wrote “to his friend Joseph Hooker in 1854” admitting that “revealing his thoughts on the mechanism of evolution, with their denial of a literal interpretation of the biblical account of creation, felt like ‘confessing a murder’” (Confessing xvi). The quoted phrase, “confessing a murder,” is accurate but, taken in its original context, does not support the fictive publisher’s rendition; Darwin does not refer to religion but merely says, “I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable” (Correspondence 3:2).3 But that inaccuracy matters little in this novel of fiction within fiction that, as part of its postmodern double game, provides detailed evidence for what is clearly untrue. The fictional author’s scientific observations are a major case in point. An ample part of the text consists of his reports, interspersed throughout the novel, of the island’s wondrous flora and fauna. In this the story teller’s experience roughly parallels that of Darwin in the Galapagos—the supposed publisher points out the similarity (xv)—of which the unnamed island is an extreme version. Isolated islands tend to evolve indigenous

Conclusion 217 species that often are unusual because of being only distantly related to species elsewhere. This is true of the Galapagos, where Darwin saw giant tortoises, marine iguanas, and other unique forms of life. Added to the novel’s other extravagances, the narrator’s island contains even stranger plants and animals. These he lovingly describes. He details their survival strategies, sexual behaviors, interactions with other species, and life cycles. They are intricate and bizarre and sometimes funny, but then again, many real plants and animals, as Dryson’s Love and the Platypus illustrates regarding Australian species, go about their business in fantastic ways. The behaviors the narrator records, however, push the limit of credibility and in several cases surpass that limit enough to call attention to the novel’s self-aware fictionality. The most extreme example is the remarkable life cycle of what he identifies as a type of sea cucumber, an elongated nondescript invertebrate, that he works out after much observation and study. The story begins with the mating of these hermaphroditic creatures: “[T]wo animals approach each other; each then turns around so that one end . . . is almost touching the other’s, and each extends an intermittent organ. These long flexible organs enter a corresponding orifice on the opposite animal” and “a wave of contraction” then repeatedly passes back and forth between the two until “both animals shudder in unison, as if with the deepest satisfaction, and the whole process is repeated. . . . over the course of several days” (134). These ultra-sexed and now pregnant creatures at a certain time of year are eaten by storks, who defecate the cucumbers’ offspring—millions “of little bright green gherkins” or “land cucumbers”—onto the island’s mountain top, where they migrate to “dildoe trees,” bore their way up into their branches from which they dangle and develop into rounded fruit-like structures, and then fall off and bounce down the mountain. “The whole mountain seems alive with bouncing balls. It is a most wondrous sight” (137). The land cucumbers fi nally fall into the sea, become sea cumbers, and the whole process repeats itself. Along the way we learn about species they interact with. The story takes up four pages, and in full detail it is particularly impressive. But it is also impossible to believe, therefore calling into question the veracity of the story teller. By his own account he is not a good man. He admits, “All my actions, even those which may appear altruistic, or at least neutral, are, and always have been, purely selfish” (101). A redeeming virtue might be his professed fondness for Darwin, but this he perhaps protests too much. More important is his feeling for animals. He delights in their activities and dislikes seeing them killed unnecessarily, which is one reason he sours on Charlie, who slaughters for pleasure. Yet he is unsentimental about life, accepting that much suffering necessarily occurs in nature’s amoral “Darwinian” realm of competition, death, and evolution. Mostly, he fi nds nature wonderful in its infi nite variety, creativity, and interconnectedness. He extols microscopes because they reveal “world upon world of new beauty” (217).

218 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels At the end of the novel, though he says he is anticipating his death, he is still involved in scientific investigation. He has been intrigued by a type of flower whose nectar “tube is too long and narrow to admit anything but the slenderest bill or proboscis” of whatever creature picks up and transmits its pollen. He says he is aware of South American moths “whose tongues unfurl to prodigious lengths, and it occurs to me that similar insects might occur on my island. I have recently discovered this is not the case; the truth is even stranger” (280–81). Those are his and the novel’s last words, and if we are to believe the narrative and its author’s love of reporting his fi ndings, then it is likely that he dies before he can disclose the solution. But his ultimate fate is another mystery, as is how the manuscript makes it to the Netherlands where it is discovered. The conclusion works in two overlapping ways, one of which requires extra-textual knowledge. Darwin was sent a specimen of a type of orchid from Madagascar and, seeing that its nectar tube was almost a foot long, predicted there must exist a moth with a tongue of that incredible length. A number of scientists dismissed this claim as preposterous, but eventually, well into the twentieth century, the predicted moth was discovered. The novel’s conclusion therefore contains a buried example of what the narrator in effect has done all along, which is to upstage Darwin—although through its accounts of amazing fictional evolutionary adaptations the novel can be seen to do the opposite. The second meaning of the conclusion is simply appreciation of animated nature’s wonderful innovations that oftentimes cause researchers to investigate it in exercises of simple curiosity and pure science. If in nothing else, the narrator of Confessing a Murder is admirable for the sincerity with which he pursues his passion for biology. This is one quality he shares with the protagonist of Love and the Platypus, who in most respects is a much different person in a more conventional novel.

III As a reward for his diligence, Scottish anatomist and embryologist William Hay Caldwell (1859–1941) was able, as a brief biographical account at the end of Nicholas Dryson’s Love and the Platypus reports, to send a “telegram on 29 August 1884 ‘MONOTREMES OVIPAROUS OVUM MEROBLASTIC,’ [that] caused a scientific sensation.” Relayed from Australia back to Britain, the message meant that platypuses lay eggs and that their fertilized egg cells split in a reptilian rather than mammalian fashion. This caused a “sensation” because, fi rst, the issue of whether or not this creature, which in many respects resembled a mammal, lays eggs had been inconclusively debated by Europeans for most of a century; second, the platypus was significant not only because of its oddities, including a duck-like “bill” and poison glands in the male, but because it confused attempts to classify species into defi nite categories—a problem for people

Conclusion 219 wanting proof of an orderly natural world including, for some, evidence of a rational Creator; and third, the natural sciences were, as we have seen, widely and enthusiastically pursued at that time, and especially so in Britain. Chapter epigraphs present a chronological series of commentaries by late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century investigators on both sides of the egg-laying debate.4 The several years Caldwell spent in Australia in the mid-1880s studying platypuses are the basis of the novel in which he learns about much more than platypuses: he discovers truths about the natural world in general, about human behaviors he had not previously experienced, and about himself. For one thing, his scientific work leads, because of experiencing an unfamiliar environment but seeing it through a Darwinian lens, to his increased apprehension of the marvels of nature, regarding which the words “wonder” and “wonderful” often occur. As in other novels taken up in this book, religion is not necessary for this experience, and neither is science sufficient unless informed by imagination and emotion. Initially, however, Caldwell seems out of touch with his own feelings and emotional needs, perhaps because his mother had been “distracted” as a parent and his father “was as stern and aloof as the God of the Old Testament” (19). At Cambridge, where he had studied and then worked, he found authors such as Byron, Emerson, and Thoreau alien to his sensibility even though “[r]omanticism was in the air—even science was romantic. . . . But since arriving in Queensland, he noticed, a change had occurred. . . . he found his mind searching for . . . analogies” in trying to comprehend his new surroundings (17–18). 5 At fi rst he also had not been inclined toward scientific connections outside those involved in his specialties of anatomy and embryology. His chief skill is dissection. But the Australian outback where he goes to study platypuses causes him to notice living animals in the intricacies of their activities and interactions, and this takes him beyond anatomy to the kind of observations the narrator of Confessing a Murder makes, except that in Caldwell’s case they are about real animals and plants.6 Love and the Platypus opens with such an observation, one of a number throughout the novel as Caldwell engages more and more with a new world. As he waits near a river for a wagon that is to pick him up along with his great stock of supplies and scientific equipment that has been left at a wharf, he watches a wasp building a nest with mud. He notices that in its expeditions flying off and returning with mud it alternates long with short trips. He follows the insect to the river and watches as it drinks its fi ll and then, instead of collecting mud available at the river, fl ies back to a patch of dirt near the nest where it fashions its own mud with the water it has carried, delivers the mud to the nest, fl ies off to make more mud at the same source, delivers that, and only then goes off on the longer trip after more water. Seeing that it retains enough water to make mud twice before having to return to the river, Caldwell understands that the wasp’s

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procedure is a matter of efficiency: “By carrying only water and making the mud on site . . . the wasp ends up having to carry much less weight overall” (7). He had already been amazed that “the wasp had not simply gathered its building material, it had manufactured it. How marvellous that this little insect . . . with a brain probably no larger than the head of a pin, could engage in such a complex—such an apparently premeditated—action. No wonder that people saw nature as proof of God the Great Designer. But how much more wonderful . . . had Mr. Darwin shown nature to be” (4; emphasis original). He accepts “the brutal fact: no death, no natural selection. That the size and shape and colour, that every action of this wasp—of every living things upon the earth—had been crafted and honed not by some mythical Creator but by the one great force of natural selection, now that was wonder indeed.” As he watches the wasp, he recognizes “Wonder, upon wonder” and later thinks, “how wonderful was nature, how perfect in all her parts” (5, 13). But although nature can be perceived as wonderful in its products and operations, it is not always pretty. It involves not only death but, from a human perspective, moral ugliness. When the wasp is almost done with its nest except for a hole, it deposits caterpillars in it, pushes in its abdomen to lay eggs, then seals the hole. From the activities of another species of wasp back in Scotland, the observer knows that “[t]hough the caterpillars appeared lifeless, the wasp’s sting had only paralysed them. They would be living food for the young wasp grub to feast upon when it hatched” (11). Darwin had been much affected by the behavior of the ichneumon, a wasp that injects its eggs into living caterpillars that are then eaten from the inside out after the larvae hatch. In a letter Darwin writes, “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.” The wasp’s behavior fits with Darwin’s exclamation, cited in the last chapter, about “[w]hat a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!” (Correspondence 8:224; 6:178). Neither Caldwell nor the novel as a whole shows such qualms. There is no condemnation of the ways of nature, nor is there the impulse to sentimentalize them or, in fact, to imagine that they contain any inherent meaning at all. Humans impose meanings, including the appreciation and valuation implicit in wonder. The novel practices a hard-headed romanticism in its many descriptions of natural phenomena, and, as the narrative develops, it displays the same disposition toward people along with their experiences and characteristics, including those of suffering, death, and the human propensity for causing both. Early on in the novel, however, Caldwell experiences in Australia are primarily of the outback, which begins his sensory, emotional, and imaginative expansion as he responds to an initially alien world. Again, part of this process is that it moves him from specialized and laboratory-bound

Conclusion 221 science into other scientific disciplines. An example of interdisciplinary science is that of a Sydney physician and another historical figure, George Bennett (1804–93), author of a book entitled Gatherings of a Naturalist (1860) that the scientifically up-to-date Caldwell at fi rst dismisses because it is twenty years out of date, but upon reading it “despite himself he was soon entranced” (23). Bennett was a natural historian of the old school, an amateur who nevertheless corresponded with scientists and published scholarly papers—although he, like his friend Richard Owen back in England, was wrong in insisting that platypuses do not lay eggs. In the novel he is a model for not restricting one’s mental life to narrow categories of phenomena or registers of response. The fictional Caldwell had visited Bennett in Sydney and received guidance in looking for platypuses, which were already extinct in many places they once existed. Late in the novel Bennett shows up at the village near where Caldwell conducts his platypus investigations; on a fossil-hunting expedition, he identifies the land as “almost certainly Triassic” (303). That Bennett is interested in fossils and geology, stressed in the early chapters of this book, as well as medicine and biology, suggests his range of interests and knowledge. Caldwell’s interest in fossils is primarily that they supported Darwin. Before leaving for Australia the young man had met with Richard Owen, who, having dissected specimens sent to him, was Britain’s expert on platypuses. Caldwell is astonished that “a man of science” like Owen could deny “the evidence of the fossil record” as well as “the simplicity—the beauty—of Darwin’s theory” (22). Caldwell sees Owen’s science, including his anatomy, as dated and constrained, although both men represent the increasing professionalization and specialization of science. But Caldwell had at least been primed for a wider view of nature by his early education. When he was a schoolboy a teacher had him and his other students read William Paley’s Natural Theology, Thomas Malthus’s On Population, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, and fi nally The Origin of Species. Caldwell was allowed to draw his own conclusions, and the effect on him was that he gave up natural theology and become a Darwinist. But he also assimilated a basis for seeing larger patterns and connections in nature and science that all four authors illustrate. The Origin is intensely multidisciplinary, and its many examples of complex relationships of species with each other and their environments make Darwin the key figure in the development of ecology. In Queensland Caldwell sees his surroundings more and more in both their interconnections and, as his perceptions sharpen, their particularities. After he encounters Aborigines, he is also able to appreciate the intelligence of their interactions with their environment. About the knowledge of their world and the skill entailed in their hunting techniques, he thinks, “[i]f this was savagery . . . it was a most sophisticated savagery.” His experience of these people does not fit with his recollection of Malthus’s assertion about Aborigines’ “barbarous customs” (223, 135). Love and the Platypus

222 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels does not vigorously attack racism and flawed anthropology, as do several other novels I have discussed; like much else in the novel, the matter is understated. In any event, the Australian natives, whose testimonies about platypuses’ egg-laying some European researchers had fatuously dismissed as coming from an unreliable source, are instrumental in Caldwell’s project; they bring dead platypuses to the research camp he has set up, and there he dissects them. Dr. Bennett had told Caldwell that the Aborigines are, like the platypuses, being destroyed by civilization (31), and he learns about a massacre, a couples decades earlier, of local Aborigines by a band of settlers (300, 333). He is now involved in the slaughter of the platypuses he prizes but does not see the contradiction until a girl points it out to him. The Scottish researcher’s experience of indigenous peoples and species is interwoven with his interactions with the colonists, of which there is a wide array, many of them eccentric; because of them there is much local color and humor in the novel. They too are part of Caldwell’s growth. In particular, he meets two sisters at the local village, a blind girl in her late teens named Ettie Brown and her adoptive sister, Mary, who is an Aborigine; they had been orphaned at an early age, their foster parents are dead, and they now live independently. They have a complicated history connected to the massacre and to several mysteries that the novel sets up and does not unravel until its fi nal pages. What is relevant here, however, is the effect on Caldwell of the two girls, and especially of Ettie, with whom he falls in love without realizing it. The platypus hunter had an unstable relationship with his mother, had no sisters, lived among men at Cambridge, and apparently for those reasons is uncomfortable around women. His friendship with Ettie proves a trial because she is highly intelligent, forceful, and enigmatic. He is also awkward with her because of her blindness, although because of Mary’s help and the almost preternatural acuteness of Ettie’s other senses it hardly constitutes a disability. Ettie shows interest in the young man’s scientific endeavors and is friendly and often humorous, but she challenges his complacent attitudes toward his science and his own life. For instance, she condemns the slaughter of platypuses for which he is responsible: “I disapprove of killing for sport, Mr Caldwell. . . . And what is your science but the sport of intellectuals?” She also asks him disorienting questions about religion. Does he believe in God, she wants to know, and whether an example he has given of “the most wonderful . . . animal action—of animal foresight. . . . [is] not proof of the existence of a wise creator?” (150). Awkward with women, he is thrown off by such questions, but they also open him to uncertainty about his own beliefs and actions. Later she draws him into a conversation about death, which she relates to the coma she suffered when she was five; when she woke up from it she was blind. He asks her if she believes in an afterlife, and she says, “I have no reason to,” even though her adoptive father was a clergyman (259). Despite the death of his parents Caldwell had not thought much about death in relation to himself; what he understands about his

Conclusion 223 own life, his own existence, is more theoretical and vocationally defi ned than felt. Calling himself an agnostic, he says that to him death means a necessary condition for evolution is to occur. Continuing the conversation, Ettie makes a distinction, not just an evolutionary connection, between humans and animals: the “main difference” she says is that “[w]e know that we are going to die.” She adds, “I don’t think I will mind dying,” and he fi nds it strange that a girl should think so much about death (258–59). Ettie Brown’s interactions with William Caldwell demonstrate to him a truth: that the value of life, heightened by awareness and acceptance of death, is not just in its applicability to scientific research but in the quality of imaginative and emotional connections of self to world. Thus as he falls in love with Ettie the sense of “wonder” he has discovered in observing nature expands to include his own nature and that of another. The lesson is heightened when Ettie and Mary’s wagon slips into flood water, they are washed out of it, and Caldwell manages to save their lives. He is powerfully drawn out of himself by recognition of the actual, experienced value of life, and the lesson again is intensified at the end of the novel when he learns that Ettie is dying—the reason, it appears, for her interest in the subject of death. When Dr. Bennett arrives on his fossil expedition he checks on Caldwell, learns about Ettie, and diagnoses troubling symptoms she had been experiencing. She is in the tertiary stage of syphilis, which was the cause for her childhood blindness. It is revealed that her disease was caught in the womb from her mother, who had been raped by a syphilitic. The perpetrator had blamed the attack on a band of Aborigines, leading to their massacre by outraged settlers. Within this context of death, cruelty, and the unfairness of fate Caldwell and Ettie acknowledge their love and commit themselves to the time they have left to them. This heightened expression of life follows upon Caldwell’s discovery of a newly laid platypus egg and, even better, of a platypus carrying an egg; through dissections he is able to make a complete series showing platypus development from ovum to egg. Out of the destruction of numerous platypuses ironically emerges this symbol of life. Caldwell’s fame is assured, but what matters now is love. And yet there is nothing sentimental about the end of the novel. Caldwell, the Doctor, Mary, and Ettie accept her imminent death. Death happens to animals, it happens to people, and what matters is the quality of life while it lasts. The novel concludes with that upbeat implication as the young lover, now assured of himself and how he fits into the world, enters Mary and Ettie’s house: “Without knocking, he turned the handle and went inside” (341). It is a primarily happy though poignant ending that recalls a conversation between Caldwell and Ettie about The Origin of Species. She says it has three main virtues, explains the first two, and when he asks about the third she closes her eyes and quotes the book’s conclusion, its message reinforced by the paradox of a gifted blind girl—a seer of sorts—closing her eyes in order to remember: “‘[F]rom so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.’” Then she “turned

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towards him, eyes now open and eyebrows lifted. ‘The third virtue, Mr Caldwell? Why, a happy ending of course’” (169). The ending of the Origin, of the novel, and of her existence signify what counts—life in the individual and all life together, human and nonhuman; it is the ethical vision without religion implicit in the Origin and explicit, as I explained in the introduction to this book, in The Descent of Man. This is the big story the novel chooses to tell. Mary Brown had informed Caldwell that “[t]o Aboriginal people, you might say the whole world is one big story” (278). The novel tells such a story about the meaning of life and death, of love and platypuses. Love and the Platypus and Confessing a Murder resemble other neoVictorian novels concerned with science and religion that, by honoring “forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” agree with George Levine’s belief that Darwin’s rendering of nature promotes a “re-enchantment” of the world through the human capacity for wonderment. Although Confessing a Murder and several other novels are exceptions, most of these texts, including Love and the Platypus, also project a moral vision through respect for nature and awareness of the interrelationship of life. For several centuries modernity in its hectic passion for change and expansion has called up opposition in forms of romanticism. Today romanticism has been absorbed, but without a need for transcending what is, by science in the form of the ecological consciousness that informs the majority of the novels I have examined. In general the narratives discussed in this book also trace characters’ development via transformative changes—mild or intense, brief or drawn out—in what they had formerly understood about themselves and their worlds. This is true not only of Love and the Platypus but of City of the Mind, The Bone Hunter, Voyage of the Narwhal, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Possession, “Eugenia Morpho,” The Biographer’s Tale, Mr. Darwin’s Shooter, Monkey’s Uncle, and Ark Baby. Despite their clear awareness that life entails suffering and loss, as does science misused, neoVictorian novels involved with science and religion are largely optimistic as they locate moral possibilities in science that marginalize those dependent on religion. In this respect Love and the Platypus is paradigmatic.

IV Other neo-Victorian novels in addition to those foregrounded in this book address the science-religion relationship—for example, J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988), although they concern technology more than science per se. The Siege of Krishnapur dramatizes, during an attack on a British outpost during the Sepoy Revolt, the gradual destruction of the British commander’s extensive collection of mementoes from the Great Exhibition while, late in the novel, a deranged priest in the midst of a chaotic battle rushes about proclaiming the argument from design. Oscar and Lucinda in several ways represents

Conclusion 225 the decline of religion, including a quixotic episode in which Oscar, an Anglican priest, attempts to have a glass church transported across the Australian outback only to see it destroyed. Both deconstruct the faith in progress and civilization represented by the Great Exhibition held in the glass encased Crystal Palace: neither religion, technology, nor Western civilization stands on fi rm ground. Penelope Fitzgerald’s Gate of Angels (1990) also relates to neo-Victorian handling of science and religion, but unlike most neo-Victorian novels concerned with religion, it does not give up on Christianity. It is set in 1912 and therefore might not qualify as a neo-Victorian novel, but it is replete with reverberations of the earlier century. One of its main characters, Fred Fairly, painlessly gives up religion—the novel shows the twentieth century in the process of doing the same—because of studying physics at Cambridge, but he looks back almost nostalgically on a time when trials and contentions surrounding faith were more dramatic: “He had heard family stories, distant echoes or reminiscences of giant battles from what seemed heroic days. Two of his uncles had quarreled over Strauss’s Leben Jesu and struck each other,” one of them dying as the result. “In his mother’s family there were some who hadn’t spoken to each other for many years, and there were women . . . who had broken off their engagements because the betrothed had ceased to believe” (32). Fairly considers himself a thorough rationalist and materialist, but that changes when he falls in love and abandons over-reliance on logic and reason. Through its treatment of romance and the emergence of the new physics—especially quantum mechanics and the indeterminate and chance-fi lled reality it reveals—the novel presents an unpredictable and mysterious world that does not preclude religious doctrine. Two biographical novels also are worth mentioning, John Darnton’s The Darwin Conspiracy (2005) and Curiosity: A Love Story (2010), by Joan Thomas. Curiosity tells the story of the young Mary Anning. Unlike Tracy Chavalier’s Remarkable Creatures, it concentrates on the romantic relationship that the historical Anning seemingly conducted with a man who has never been defi nitively identified. Thomas casts into this role the geologist Henry De la Beche—Anning’s friend in real life—and the novel is divided between his and her stories as it fluidly oscillates between external events and their perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. De la Beche has given up on religion in favor of science, and Anning, in this version unlike Chavalier’s, shows little allegiance to religion, apart from keeping the Sabbath, but she is continually curious about the discrepancies between Genesis and the story that fossils are unfolding to her. Curiosity is her chief trait, although “curiosity” is also what the novel exercises in imagining a romantic relationship, fatally compromised by class differences, between her and De la Beche. The novel follows the pattern of other neo-Victorian narratives that remove religion as an adequate way of understanding human reality. For Anning the world exists for its own sake, operating according to its own

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nature without relationship to human hopes and fears, but it is remarkable nonetheless. Looking at the land and the sea, De la Beche says, “I see God withdrawn from it all,” and Anning replies, “Well, it is no less the miracle for that” (377). She sees “life to no purpose except as life” but also acknowledges loss, change, and renewal: “The world is everyday creating itself,” she says (395, 387). Tied to what she learns from studying fossils of extinct creatures, her openness to change in nature makes her curious about the possibility of evolution. “Can a creature be changed into something else?” she wonders (301). The Darwin Conspiracy resembles Possession: again, two contemporary researchers who become lovers gradually uncover documents that reveal shocking truths about Victorian characters, with the novel moving back and forth between present-day and nineteenth-century narratives interspersed with fictional letters and journal entries. The novel is also reminiscent of Confessing a Murder in imagining that Darwin was not the originator of the theory of evolution by natural selection. We learn that he was guilty of transgressions that, because of guilt and worry that they will be disclosed, explain his many years of bad health and long delay in publishing his theory. Religion plays a minor role in the novel, although Darwin’s loss of faith, his wife’s piety, and FitzRoy’s religiosity are all touched upon. Poor Things (1992), a neo-Victorian science fiction novel by Alasdair Gray, also merits attention. Gray’s book is an earlier and more elaborate exemplar of the narrative approach employed by Confessing a Murder. Poor Things likewise asserts the genuineness of a discovered manuscript accompanied by material, including notes and the history and analysis of the document, provided by a fictional editor bearing the name of the novel’s author. In the main narrative a doctor, Godwin Baxter, transplants into the body of a dead woman, a suicide victim, the living brain of the baby with which she had been pregnant. Frankenstein is a clear model, but Bella, the being that results from the transplant, is no monster; as her brain rapidly develops, and through the effects of the doctor’s painstaking education of her, she develops into an intellectual and moral superwoman. The novel involves medical science, which it attaches to its overall concern with social justice and its violations; religion, when referred to, is simply a force of exploitation and repression. The only use I wish to make of Poor Things relates to a picture said to hang on the doctor’s wall. It is identified as “Kobolds Discovering the Skeleton of Ichthyosaurus in a Cavern under the Harz Mountains” (29). The extensive notes to the fictional manuscript include a reproduction of the print with the accompanying information that “[t]he first ichthyosaurus was discovered by Mary Anning (the fossil woman of Lyme Regis) in 1810” (281, 280). The picture is taken from R. A. Pouchet’s The Universe or The Wonders of Creation (Pouchet 556). Running through many editions after being translated into English in 1871, this comprehensive text, one of many similarly comprehensive works published in the nineteenth century for a popular audience, testifies to Victorians’ abiding love of natural science.

Conclusion 227 Kobolds are underground-dwelling dwarves or gnomes, and the print displays them in a cavern, stalactites and bats overhead, as they work away with picks around an enormous, largely exposed ichthyosaur fossil. From above light obliquely streams into the darkness, illuminating the excavation site. One dwarf sits and plays bagpipes, apparently encouraging the others in their labors. The connection to Mary Anning, a female scientific investigator who was literally as well as figuratively ground-breaking, is relevant to Bella and the brilliant scientific or medical career Baxter envisions for her despite society’s gender bias. Like many other neo-Victorian novels, Poor Things supports the social justice often denied on the basis of gender, class, and race. The print also expresses the fascination of science to which Baxter wishes to expose his protégée. Pouchet suggests a connection between science and the activity of the gnomes: “According to the believers in the Cabala, there existed innumerable legions of gnomes, which were scattered through the bowels of the earth”; along with their mining activities, considered beneficial to humans, they “collect[ed] mysteriously in the darkness those singular petrifactions which were one day to reveal to us unknown worlds” (660). As explained earlier, ichthyosaurs incorporated a sense of strangeness and mystery associated with the ancientness of the earth and its hidden treasures. The delving kobolds resemble scientists discovering a new trove of knowledge, in this case in the form of “singular petrifactions” such as fossilized ichthyosaur skeletons. The importance of revealing “unknown worlds” goes unquestioned, justifying the labor involved; the excavators are engaged, in a sense, in pure science. Earlier in the century ichthyosaurs and other fossils, along with geology in general, raised questions about biblical accuracy, especially regarding the age of the earth, how it was formed, the creation of life, and how these matters relate to humans. But in the late nineteenth-century print and in Pouchet’s comments about dwarves, the ichthyosaur is important for its own sake, for what it can add to the sum of knowledge. The meaning of the ichthyosaur is thoroughly secularized. The gnomes with picks and bagpipe sound the positive note that rings through the most of the novels covered in this book. Science at its best illuminates “worlds of wonder.”

V To sum up, Science, Religion, and the Neo-Victorian Novel has traced out, in roughly chronological order according to their nineteenth-century settings—with 1859 and the publication of The Origin of Species as the center or pivot point—a group of neo-Victorian novels that reconceive, in creative hybridizations of present and past, fiction and fact, the interactions of Victorian science and religion. These novels apply the concerns, attitudes, and literary methods of recent times to nineteenth-century materials.

228

Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels

Understanding that earlier world is important for appreciating the neo-Victorian novels in question, even those that play fast and loose with historical fact, in their treatment of science and religion. They do so especially not only by depicting individual crises that undermine what characters had believed about themselves and their worlds but by fi nding in the sciences, especially natural science, the possibility of a renewed basis for ethics and belief in the ability of humans on their own, without divine support, to effect a better world reanimated by moral imagination and wonderment at natural reality. Not all protagonists participate in this process—some do not need it and some are immune to it—but the ones who do, the majority of those I have discussed, replace fraught identities with coherent ones integrated with the world. They replace fragile self-conception with realized identity, ego with authenticity. In some novels these transformations occur through an outright rejection of religion following a crisis of faith precipitated by science; in others religion either is simply left behind or, in its less dogmatic forms, accommodated with science. These novels also delineate a generalized nineteenth-century cultural crisis in which doubt replaces belief. They accept the triumph of secularism—whether it entails atheism, skepticism, agnosticism, or just unconcern about religion—and, in most cases, fi nd hope nonetheless. But it is a qualified hope because the modern world, in Victorian guise and even more so today, is complex and dangerous. Ultimately we are in the same boat as Victorians, caught in the same sea of modernity and disoriented by its complicated currents of influence and change. Whatever the appeal of the hundreds of present-day novels concerned with the nineteenth century, those featured in this book do not fi nd a safe haven in the past. Rather, through the impact of science on everything and of the continuing relevance of the fears, desires, and values traditionally attached to religion, they illuminate the challenges of being human both in the natural world and in the cultural world we have created and that participates in creating us. Neo-Victorian fiction that engages science, religion, and the issues of human meaning they encompass pose the question, relevant to us as it was to Victorians, of whether modernity can connect us to or only separate us from a livable world. What meanings can we attach to an inherently meaningless universe? What sort of world do we discover, or create, upon finding ourselves east of Eden?

Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1. Neo-Victorian studies has recently generated its fi rst international conferences and a journal of its own. “Neo-Victorianism: The Politics and Aesthetics of Appropriation” took place at University of Exeter in 2007 and “Fashioning the Neo-Victorian: Iterations of the Nineteenth Century in Contemporary Literature and Culture” at the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg in 2010. The fi rst issue of Neo-Victorian Studies appeared in 2008. 2. In his book Andrew Radford offers a detailed exploration of the cliffhanging scene in relation to its scientific and intellectual Victorian context (49–62). A number of critics have connected the scene to Swift’s Ever After, as I do here. 3. Like his author, Knight would have been aware that nineteenth-century popularizers of geology, most notably Gideon Mantell in Wonders of Geology (1838), had originated the tactic of reversing and accelerating the flow of organic and geological history to dramatize the fluidity of the past and its impress on the present. 4. More than any other scholar, American intellectual historian and Victorianist Gertrude Himmelfarb has promoted traditional values she associates with the nineteenth century. The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (1995) sums up her position. 5. Victorian Studies achieved clear disciplinary status with the founding of the journal Victorian Studies in 1956. 6. These authors are responding to “the unification factor”—the problem of whether or to what degree the perceived unity of the “Victorian” era is a spurious consequence of Victoria’s long reign and as such a glossing over of the discontinuities within the period (2–3). I believe the Victorian aspect of my subject—science, religion, and matters of faith and doubt—entails a considerable degree of unity, especially when understood in terms of trends. A precise defi nition of “Victorian” is not necessary for my purposes; acknowledgement of actual Victorian history—that certain people and things are known to have existed or occurred—and knowledge of a range of subjects connected to the years during and immediately before and after the reign of Queen Victoria suffice. 7. Shuttleworth also puts the matter this way: today there is no “sense that there is a framework of belief waiting to be ruptured. . . . For the Victorians there was a decisive crisis of faith, a sense that the world was shaking under them. . . . For the postmodern era no such form of crisis seems possible, for there are no fi xed boundaries of belief. . . . [nor] any fi xed points of faith against which it may define itself” (“Writing” 154, 155).

230 Notes 8. Kohlke and Christian Gutleben have recently pursued these themes in their edited book Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma (2010). 9. In 1996, presenting Possession as a kind of transitional text between confl icting literary-philosophical investments, Elisabeth Bronfen writes, “[W]hile literary and cultural studies in the 70’s and early 80’s explored the potential of post-structuralist terminology in an effort at describing how the subject— grafted onto a complex network of significatory difference, deferral and displacement—came to embody and perform gender constructions, concepts such as emplacement, ensoulment, coherence, closure, ethics and moral commitment seem to be emerging as a new critical concern” (119). 10. With his 1981 book The Realistic Imagination George Levine was in the vanguard of those taking this tack. He writes that “nineteenth-century writers were already self-conscious about the nature of their medium” and “the possibilities of indeterminate meaning [and] . . . alert to the arbitrariness of the reconstructed order toward which they point as they imply the inadequacy of traditional texts and, through self-reference and parody, the tenuousness of their own” while nevertheless “believing in the possibility of fictions that bring us at least a little closer to what is not ourselves and not merely language” (4). He fi nds “modern”—what today might be called postmodern—qualities in the novels of Sir Walter Scott, saying, for instance, that although he is not as serious as “modern writers, in their fictionality of language and fictions. . . . Scott gives us a . . . version of what must happen when any novelist makes imaginative forays beyond literature into the real and needs to consider the status in truth of what they write” (87). 11. Hearing the mournful “retreat” of the “Sea of Faith,” the dispirited speaker of “Dover Beach” in reaction turns to faithfulness between himself and his unnamed lover as the only remaining source of meaning, although it is doubtful he is much reassured. 12. A number of Mary Anning biographies have been published in recent years, including The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World (2009) by Shelley Emling. Most of these are for children or adolescents. 13. Defi ning “material reality” as matter and energy raises the question of how in turn to defi ne those two qualities. The most precise and least contentious answers will be scientific, which lends a circular quality to my characterization of science and privileges, as far as defi nition goes, science over religion. I know of no way to avoid this problem, which attests to reliance upon science, and its reliance on mathematics, for the greatest amount of exactitude possible in understanding attributes of the universe. 14. In the nineteenth century and earlier “lower criticism” referred to textual analysis of one or more non-original documents, likely inaccurate because of flaws introduced in the copying process, in order to reconstruct the original text. The Higher Criticism sought to understand what ancient texts meant in their original historical situations and the circumstances of their production and reception. But the Higher Criticism also refers to the activity of nineteenth-century German biblical scholars who used the historical method to ascertain what in the Bible can be accepted as true, as well as when, where, and how parts and aspects of the Bible came about. Believers in the literal, God-given truth of the Bible of course found this activity not only unnecessary but offensive. 15. History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) by John William Draper and A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896) by Andrew Dickson White are generally credited with being the sources of the confl ict theory as it influenced later historians.

Notes

231

16. “Science and Religion” was a common title for nineteenth-century articles and published sermons. A sample of other titles: “On the Aspect of Science towards Religion,” “Science the Handmaid of Religion,” “Religion in its Connection to Science,” “Are the Interests of Science Opposed to the Interests of Religion?” “Religion versus Science,” “The Apparent Opposition of Science and Religion,” “Conciliation of Science and Religion,” “Geology in Its Relations to Revealed Religion,” “What Has Science to Do with Religion?” and “The Bible Examined by Modern Science and Reason.” Streams of responses and rebuttals were unleashed by books and pamphlets such as Richard Carlile’s An Address to Men of Science: Calling upon Them to Stand Forward and Vindicate the Truth from the Foul Grasp and Persecution of Superstition (1821); Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844); The Origin of Species (1859); Essays and Reviews (1860), authored by seven liberal Anglican clergymen; and Max Müller’s Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873) and his lectures on the same subject. 17. Darwin could not prove it, but he believed, erroneously as it turned out, that natural laws rather than randomness underlie individual variations. 18. In Hardy’s poem the speaker joins in the funeral procession for God and mourns with others for the “man-projected Figure” whose myth he could not accept. 19. Attempts were made by William James and others to scientifically investigate spiritualism; Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters (2006) gives a detailed and entertaining account of these efforts. 20. Bookstore shelves are loaded with volumes about the relationship of science and religion written by theologians, scientists, social and religious historians, and others. Few of their arguments were not anticipated by Victorians. 21. If neo-Victorian novels must be understood as postmodern because of selfaware questionings of history and deconstructions of fiction and fact, then many of today’s historical novels set in the nineteenth century do not readily qualify; they are mysteries, romances, and adventure tales whose objective is unproblematic entertainment. 22. “Robert Elsmere was the literary event of 1888. It was extensively reviewed, read, and commented upon, went through numerous editions, and even became the subject of a number of clerical sermons from a variety of church pulpits” (Towheed 389; emphasis original). The novel is reported to have sold over a million copies, many of them in America. It elicited a famous review by Prime Minister William Gladstone (Nineteenth Century, 1888). 23. Books about morality and evolution include Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal (1994), Michael Shermer’s The Science of Good and Evil (2004), Barbara King’s Evolving God (2007), and Matt Rossano’s Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved (2010). 24. Mill in “On Nature” (1874) and Huxley in “Evolution and Ethics” (1894) argue that nature is amoral and that ethical behavior necessitates limiting and controlling nature. Huxley in particular was responding to what became known as social Darwinism. 25. As with “postmodernism,” though on a lesser scale, there has been much thought given to defi ning “postsecularism” and, indeed, to determining if the term actually refers to a real phenomenon. The most influential participant in this discussion has been sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas. In “Notes on Post-Secular Society” (2008) he points out that “[a]n ever smaller number of sociologists now support the hypothesis, and it went unopposed for a long time, that there is close linkage between the modernization of society and the secularization of the population” (17). In his view secularism was never pronounced enough, outside of government, to legitimize the idea

232

Notes

of a post-secular phase of history. Habermas and others note that religion worldwide in some ways has been becoming more prominent in public life. Certainly it has become more important as a subject of literary scholarship. 26. Another way to organize the materials of this book might be according to when neo-Victorian novels were written over the half-century of their existence and how they respond to the social, intellectual, and literary emphases of their particular times of origin. I have not, however, detected patterns pronounced enough to be helpful with the sub-genre that is my focus, and therefore I have used nineteenth-century chronology but also grouped novels in terms of shared themes and approaches.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 1. Anning became widely known as a fossil collector, but her background and gender meant that she was in no position to publish or address learned societies; there is much evidence that she would have been capable of doing both under less discouraging circumstances. 2. See Dean 58–60 for an overview of the early descriptions of ichthyosaurs based on Anning’s fi nds. 3. Although the earliest discovered specimens, dating from the Jurassic, were dolphin or fish shaped, not all ichthyosaurs, especially the early ones, fit that description. For discussion of various types of ichthyosaurs from the early to late Mesozoic, see McGowan, Dinosaurs, Chapter 10. 4. Anning also discovered the first English remains of the pterodactyl (pterosaur). 5. I learned of departures from Verne’s language via the Project Gutenberg e-text of Malleson’s translation, the headnote to which cites Christien Sánchez for detecting inconsistencies and providing examples. Forewarned, I noticed other inaccuracies, along with the “preadamite” translation of antediluvians, and subsequently Mr. Sánchez kindly sent me further instances of the clergyman’s Bible-related adjustments to Verne’s text. 6. Verne’s long-time editor, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, pressed him to display, or at least not violate, Christian piety in his various narratives. 7. From this point on, quotations from Verne’s novel are taken from the Butcher translation. 8. Based on evidence for sedimentation, Neptunism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries argued that rocks were precipitated from minerals in a worldwide primordial ocean; the rival theory of Plutonism held that rocks resulted from the heat and pressure of volcanic action. Lyell’s position in some ways agreed with Plutonism, but his uniformitarianism envisioned long-term, ongoing cycles of volcanic actions and their effects whereas the Plutonists focused primarily on geological origins. Also in opposition to Lyell, Plutonists sometimes embraced catastrophism, the belief that the earth’s features were formed and molded through sudden, violent episodes—eruptions, earthquakes, and floods—a position that contradicted uniformitarian gradualism. Some Plutonists embraced directionalism and progressionism, which Lyell also rejected. Ultimately modern geology would accept both the sedimentary and volcanic formation of rocks while understanding earth history as, in general, a gradual but not steady-state process as Lyell imagined; it has evolved through various stages evidencing the directionalism implicit in a cooling earth. 9. This chapter is a modified version of my 2009 article “‘The World-Renowned Ichthyosaurus’” published in the Journal of Literature and Science.

Notes

233

10. For example, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and elsewhere Thomas Kuhn has influentially argued that science can never be fully objective, since the paradigms that control scientific practice necessarily reflect the arbitrariness of broad societal influences. Paul Feyerabend believes “science has no greater authority than any other form of life. Its aims are certainly not more important than are the aims that guide the lives in a religious community or in a tribe that is united by a myth” (299). Still, if logic and evidence are criteria for determining or approximating truth, then science has an evidentiary status that perhaps is most apparent because of the danger, witnessed many times in the past, in its denial on non-scientific grounds. A current case in point is the rejection, for reasons political, economic, and ideological, of the human contribution to global warming. 11. Nicolaas Rupke’s Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin (1994) is the most accomplished biography of Owen, although it is concerned almost exclusively with his professional and intellectual rather than personal life. Evelleen Richards’s “A Question of Property Rights: Richard Owen’s Evolutionism Reassessed” (1987) presents a very detailed analysis of Owen’s complicated responses to evolutionary theories. 12. So eager is he to fi nd meaning in the anarchic destruction he witnesses at the hands of the Whites that he is willing, once the steamboat arrives at Kurtz’s trading station, to downplay the man’s degeneration into a moral monster who, in his domination of local tribes, had violated Western ethical standards even more thoroughly than had the Company. Thus Marlow interprets Kurtz’s famous last words, “the Horror, the Horror,” whose actual meaning is uncertain, as Kurt’s last minute moral victory upon recognition of what he had done. In fact, Marlow needs to redeem himself for his involvement in moral darkness and meaninglessness by redeeming the man he once had looked to as a beacon of civilized values. 13. The jungle as site of a vegetative Darwinian struggle for existence appears in Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly (1895), An Outcast of the Islands (1896), and Tales of Unrest (1898) (see Glendening, Evolutionary 241–43, 247). 14. British confidence had fallen off since mid-century and the self-celebratory Great Exhibition. By the century’s end doubts had arisen in many people’s minds stemming from imperial setbacks, the rise of powerful international economic and military rivals, a depressed economy, scientific and sociological theories concerning entropy and degeneration, the approach of a new century with unknown challenges, and—focusing these anxieties—the imminent death of Queen Victoria and the end of the age named after her. Anxiety about social, political, moral, and physical degeneration especially influenced creative writers of the time, including Conrad and Hardy, as did the somewhat kindred phenomenon of literary naturalism, with its focus on the social and hereditary forces that dominate people’s lives and suppress free will. Neither Conrad nor Hardy, however, assumes the clinical, scientific sort of detachment from their characters and stories promoted by naturalism.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 1. Specializing in fossilized fish, Philpot made important discoveries from which male associates profited; her scientific connections later availed Mary Anning in her work. Because her fi nds were far less dramatic Philpot never attracted the attention Anning received. 2. Non-fiction books about Anning include The Fossil Hunter by Shelley Emling (2009) and Jurassic Mary by Patricia Pierce (2006). There are also a

234 Notes

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

number of juvenile books, both biographies and novels, about her. See also: Christopher McGowan, The Dragon Hunters; Deborah Cadbury, The Dinosaur Hunters; and especially Hugh Torrens, “Mary Anning (1799–1847) of Lyme.” A recent biographical novel about Anning is Curiosity by Joan Thomas. Parts of fossilized ichthyosaurs had been found before but were interpreted “as belonging to some sort of crocodile” (McGowan 22), and thus Emling has Anning informally refer to her fi nd as a “croc” even after specialists recognized ichthyosaurs were a different order of reptile. See Dennis R. Dean, Gideon Mantell and the Discovery of Dinosaurs, 58–60, for early descriptions of ichthyosaurs based on Anning’s fi nds. Initially a vigorous advocate of Mosaic geology, Buckland eventually admitted that physical evidence did not uphold the story of the biblical flood. Boccardi also writes that “the paucity and discontinuity of the records of the past are compounded by the intellectual and affective chasm that separates Unwin from the subject of his research. Both the nature of the Victorian man’s spiritual crisis and the rigorous integrity with which he adheres to his beliefs are alien to the spiritually empty world described in the contemporary narrative.” It is easy, however, for critics dealing with postmodernism to overstate the discrepancies between past and present. Boccardi sees this similarity: “[C]ontemporary impasses are here shown to be reverberations of earlier Victorian questioning. This strengthens the connections between past and present . . . at the same time as pointing to a persistent undermining of the perceived uniqueness of the postmodern condition vis-à-vis a nostalgically sought nineteenth-century model of representational and intellectual innocence” (88, 89). Neo-Victorian fiction attests to the strength of Victorian reverberations. Wendy Wheeler detects a redemptive possibility in the concluding repetition. Given that it follows Unwin’s recounting of his and Ruth’s sexual consummation, “the deathly verb” can “be read erotically. . . . In this sense ‘he took his life’ signifies acceptance of life as it is—both terrible and banal, sublime and domestic, at the same time—rather than suicide. This ambiguity . . . suggests a desire to tolerate anxiety and ambivalence which is part of the relinquishment of [the] narcissistic melancholia” that had stifled Unwin’s life with unproductive substitutes for reality. Thus there is the possibility of a “move from the narcissisms of the child to the sociality of the adult consciousness” (75). The last we hear from Pearce he is headed to America for a new life, to a new world of grand possibilities signified by the West as already suggested in its connection to the Great Western Railway. Unwin reports that Pearce drowned at sea. Despite his suffering he maintains hope in his future never to be realized, ultimately one more dispiriting influence on Unwin. Malcolm says the “novel is a matter of destruction and transience. The atom bomb destroys; the great trains of the thirties and forties pass into oblivion; plastic becomes a substitute for hundreds of other materials. . . . Further, Darwin is, according to Unwin, all about transience” (247).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 1. The complex history of “ideology” has generated various defi nitions and shades of meaning, not all of them negative (see Williams, Key 153–57). 2. Buffon “continued with private experiments, and came up with new estimates of Earth’s age: a million years, three million, ten million. He didn’t

Notes

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

235

publish such numbers, not so much from fear of the religious authorities—by now he was too old to care—but because he thought the public wasn’t ready for them: ‘Why does the human mind seem to lose itself in the length of time?’” (Baxter 55). Herschel based his calculations on the time he calculated it would take light from distant stars to reach the earth. One commentator says that Australian colonists recorded “scores of sorrowful expressions of regard for [Aborigines]; tenfold the number of condemnations of them as debased, worthless and beyond grace; and one-hundredfold, acceptances of their inevitable extinction” (Stanner 147; qtd. in Brantlinger 119). For discussions of Tasmanian Aborigines and their demise, see Stocking 275–83 and Brantlinger 117–140. In the epilogue to English Passengers, Kneale identifies “a formidable [native] woman named Walyeric, who fought the whites and was greatly feared by them,” as the original of Peevay’s mother (439). For further discussion of Knox and The Races of Man see Brantlinger 39–44. Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676), David Hume (1711–76), Charles White (1728– 1813), and Samuel George Morton (1799–1851) had previously promoted the idea of polygenesis. On Hume, White, Morton, and the subject of polygenesis in general, see Gould, Mismeasure 40–42, 50–56. Knox writes, “Men are of various Races; call them Species, if you will; call them permanent varieties.” Regardless, he says, the point is that “in human history race is everything” (9–10). He supports his insistence on the unalterable nature of races by claiming that when distinct human groups intermix, any resulting offspring will die, fail to reproduce, or produce a feeble line of descendants that will soon die out. Knox’s incontinent subdividing of humanity produces an abundance of races/species, which among others include Saxons, Germans, Normans, Celts, Gypsies, Copts, Jews, Phoenicians, Slavonians, Sarmatians, Caff res, Negroes, Chinese, and “American races.” He understands the domination and, often times, extinction of lesser races by whites—the “Normans” in particular—as morally ugly but inevitable, based as it is upon the natural antipathy of Whites toward dark-skinned races (33, 153). “I doubt all theories of human progress in time,” Knox writes in response particularly to the evolutionary scheme of Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Knox 28). His cynicism is evident in his belief that the principle of might makes right will always dominate history—not because the principle is morallyacceptable, but because human nature is imbued with racial antipathies. For example, Knox refers to the “wish to serve Africa [that] forms the excuse for an expedition to the Niger, the real object being the enslaving the unhappy Negro [sic], dispossessing him of his lands and freedom.” While this sounds sympathetic, Knox contends that “the strong will always grasp at the property and lands of the weak” and that while “[t]he doctrine which teaches us to love our neighbors as ourselves is admirable,” it is also naïve because of the innate and unalterable dislike of whites for lesser races (38–39). Typical of Knox’s attitude toward Christianity is his statement, concerning the moral pretenses of imperialists, that “I prefer the manly robber to this sneaking, canting hypocrisy peculiar to modern civilization and to Christian Europe” (38). “Savagery . . . was frequently treated as self-extinguishing. The fantasy of auto-genocide or racial suicide is an extreme version of blaming the

236

14.

15.

16. 17.

Notes victim, which throughout the last three centuries has helped to rationalize or occlude the genocidal aspects of European conquest and colonization” (Brantlinger 2). Despite his rejection of the evolutionary scheme of Chambers’s Natural History of Creation, published six years before The Races of Men, Knox may well have been influenced by Chambers’s form of recapitulation in which the human embryo as it develops moves through stages representing primitive races. “[I]n size of the brain,” Knox writes, “they [“the dark races”] seem . . . considerably inferior to” white races. Inferiority also appears in “the form of the skull” which is “placed differently on the neck.” Knox adds that in nonwhites the shape, texture, and color of the brain and “the whole shape of the skeleton differs from ours, as so also I fi nd do the forms of almost every muscle of the body” (151–52). Brantlinger reports that upon his death the head of the last surviving male was taken by one scientist, the “hands and feet and then the rest of the body” by another, with various parts ending up in London (128–29). The legal and moral question remains of whether or not the Tasmanian Aborigines in some sense survive after all—in the form of this new mixed breed. In America, Australia, and elsewhere, the issue of whether or not those of mixed race can be considered native has significant implications for tribal or group identity and for receiving government aid or securing reparations. A related and equally vexed question is how much native blood makes one native. The most liberal answer—any at all—would divest Truganini of her status as the last native Tasmanian.

NOTE TO CHAPTER 5 1. Many Victorian skeptics and unbelievers, including George Eliot, continued to assert Christian morality. 2. While most evolutionary biologists agree about these matters, they are still open to challenge. For example, not everyone concedes that Darwinian evolution should be understood as nonprogressive. For example, Michael Ruse asserts that “evolutionism for Charles Darwin meant progress, linked to Progressionism” (Monad 155). And some scientists think that natural selection alone does not adequately account for evolution, that other processes must be involved—for instance that natural selection is supported by the inherent tendency of matter under some conditions to self-organize. 3. Existentialism represents a cluster of philosophical stances, not always consistent, developed by various thinkers. Defi nitions often start with the dictum of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose thinking overall seems closest to Fowles’s understanding of existentialism, that “existence precedes essence.” To claim that our existence (that we are) precedes our essence (what we essentially become) is a denial of any predetermined nature and an assertion of our inescapable freedom to choose who we become within our horizons of possibility formed by our “brute facticity”—the biological and social givens to which we are subject. We are, according to Sartre, “condemned” to freedom, an experience that is often met with despair, denial, and fanciful evasions in our attempts to escape responsibility for our own lives and character. Sartre also argues that the world is bereft of inherent meaning. A mountain is not tall, nor a winter’s day cold until it is experienced as such by an individual who projects meaning onto the world. Thus individuals are condemned not

Notes

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

237

only to choose who they become within their unique horizons, but to make meaningful, via their freely chosen “projects,” the world in which they live. Ernestina’s last name, Freeman, ironically points to what Smithson is not and probably will never become should he marry her. At the same time her father is in a sense quite aptly named, free to build upon his capitalistic success, and the servant Sam places himself on the same path after leaving Smithson’s service. In evolutionary terms, Freeman and Sam adapt themselves to an increasingly dominant commercial environment while Smithson and his non-adaptive ilk seem fated for extinction. When Freeman makes his pitch to his prospective son-in-law to help run his department store, the businessman couches the matter in terms of adaptation vs. extinction that he has picked up from the other (287), and Smithson, as a “gentleman” appalled by the prospect but without any other clear path in life, more and more comes to see himself, along with his whole class, as fated for social extinction. Pohler argues that cultural selection like natural selection involves both contingency and causality, the former of which disallows the deterministic directedness implicit in the ladder of nature: “[T]he horizontal process of cultural selection” means that “history is both inherited and contingent” and thus that “part of a given individual’s essence does precede his or her existence (genetic and cultural inheritance); but it also means that the individual . . . has chance moments that are authentic. ” She interprets the multiple endings of the novel as horizontal or “equally ‘plausible’” possibilities that might arise from the contingencies of history (57, 58). She also claims that “Fowles’s notion of natural selection” undermines the idea “that individuals are capable of freely choosing one set of beliefs over another. Fowles demonstrates how individuals and the cultural species to which they belong shape one another in the process of cultural selection” (4). I am not clear, however, about how individual authenticity can emerge as a matter of “chance” within this complex web of cultural influence. But certainly causality and contingency are both at work in Charles’s life, much as they are in the process of writing a novel. My 2007 book The Evolutionary Imagination focuses on the prevalence of “entangled bank” imagery in late Victorian novels and its implications. As other critics have done, Susana Onega considers the many ways “[i]n agreement with post-Modernist metafictional practice” that Fowles undermines the “illusion” of the all-knowing narrator, saying that he “break[s] it, to show us its provisionality, its intrinsically fictional character” thus revealing “the advisability of seeing the everyday reality as a construct similar to that of [realist] fiction.” He “turns the Victorian convention of the omniscient godlike narrator upside down,” treating it “parodically,” in the same spirit of freedom that Smithson must enact in his own life (74, 75, 78). In this line of thought, the subversion of the omniscient narrator represents an analog for Smithson’s rejection of a God-controlled universe and his eventual assumption of the burden of freedom. In Descent of Man Darwin stresses the survival value of group living, sympathy, and cooperation out of which an inherent ethical nature evolves (I: 71–73, 103). In “Existentialism Is a Humanism” Sartre explains that an individual’s commitment to freedom must take into account the freedom of others, thus providing a basis for judging their behavior. We will freedom for freedom’s sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own. . . . Consequently, when I recognize, as entirely authentic, that man is a being whose existence precedes his essence,

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Notes and that he is a free being who cannot, in any circumstances, but will his freedom, at the same time I realize that I cannot not will the freedom of others. Thus . . . I can form judgments upon those who seek to hide from themselves the wholly voluntary nature of their existence and its complete freedom. (366)

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6 1. Neo-Victorian authors such as Fowles and Byatt interested in natural history and evolutionary theory sometimes evoke a view of nature—a potential for experiencing nature in a particularly vital way—akin to that of “natural supernaturalism.” Coined by Thomas Carlyle in Sartor Resartus (1834), the phrase refers to the human potential to recognize the supernatural in the natural or, more generally, the miraculous in everyday reality; it is the key concept in Natural Supernaturalism, M. H. Abrams’s classic 1971 study of romanticism. But whereas Carlyle, Wordsworth, and the American Transcendentalists they influenced sensed a divine spirit immanent in nature, neo-Victorian authors base the innate capacity to appreciate and participate in nature on an evolutionary connection to the environmental forces that shaped humanity and, through shared ancestry, to other life forms. 2. It did not take long for critics to recognize that the involvement of Possession in postmodernism was more tactical than philosophical and that it in fact creatively presented a realist challenge to postmodern dogma. In an essay explaining the novel’s participation in the romance genre, Susanne Becker in 1994 proposed that “[p]rovocatively speaking, Possession marks the end of postmodernism, or, at least, the threshold between postmodern thought and new forms of more realist representation.” In a footnote she explains, “These new explorations of realism have been anticipated most strongly by the English ‘self-conscious realism’ that A. S. Byatt has long been a part of, but also by post-colonial practices within postmodernism” (17, 17n2). 3. Neumeier continues, “The recurrent acknowledgement that ‘truth is inaccessible’ is countered by the unrelenting insistence on searching for it. Thus two competing concepts of reality are set off against each other thereby revealing their respective deficiencies.” She notes that the novel wavers between, on the one hand, postmodern skepticism about knowledge and, on the other, belief that it is achievable—an instability “critics have repeatedly commented on” (“Female” 12). I believe these two propositions are not equal, however; this novel, in which truths about the past are uncovered and scientific knowledge endorsed, clearly favors the second. Tim S. Gauthier argues that “Byatt’s work invites interpretation as a direct, but ambivalent, response to the influences of poststructuralism and postmodernism. Largely it rejects them.” Part of this disposition, he contends, is its attachment to Victorian worldview and to Victorians “characterized by a confidence and a passion” that their twentieth-century protagonists lack (32), a view shared with most critics. 4. Nevertheless a shadow remains, cast by the sadness of LaMotte’s life following the suicide of her companion, Blanche; her separation from Ash; and her relinquishing of their child, even though she transmutes her experiences into her greatest work of poetry. 5. With the exception of a few stressed words, the novel places correspondence between Ash and LaMotte in italics. 6. From the epilogue to Dramatis Personae (1864). 7. Ash’s shady biographer, Professor Cropper, claims that his subject’s studies of regeneration in lower organisms indicates fear of death, to which “he

Notes

8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

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and his contemporaries were all hideously subject.” But this claim, unsupported elsewhere in the novel, appears a projection of Cropper’s own disposition evidenced in his mania for collecting and hoarding artifacts associated with Ash. Maud points out that his biography seems a debunking exercise in “reverse hagiography: the desire to cut its subject down to size” (271, 272). In a word game Mattie cleverly supplies Adamson with “incest” as an anagram for “insect” (153). Eugenia’s onetime fiancé had committed suicide, and the reason, it turns out, is because he had learned about her and her brother’s relationship. Mattie gives voice to this attitude, telling Adamson, “I am twenty-seven. . . . I have only one life, and twenty-seven years of it are past, and I intend to begin living” (157). Alabaster quotes at length from In Memoriam to demonstrate that Tennyson’s loss of faith, caused in part by his knowledge of geology and fossils, was followed by the poet’s spiritual recovery (87, 88). Acknowledging scientific reasons for disbelief and then trying to explain them away is Sir Harald’s approach to his spiritual difficulties. Alabaster is able to replace the workings of natural selection with those of God by seizing upon Darwin’s use of metaphors and analogies in his impressive, for its time, explanation of how the eye evolved (Origin 186–89). Early in the story Adamson’s interactions with Eugenia intimate, as another example of insect-human correlation, Darwin’s theory of sexual selection as proposed in the Origin (87–90) and elaborated in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. For example, Adamson responds to Eugenia’s appearance and dress reminiscent of an exotic butterfly, and in talking to her about gender attraction he imagines her and her sisters as flowers designed to lure bees. He implicates dancing and ball gowns in the same line of thought (6, 7, 40). By the time Eugenia is attacked by male moths because of her colorful clothing the point has been made that the sexual imperative, which evolutionarily is merely the reproductive imperative, instinctually dominates humans as much as it does insects (54). His explanation for beauty also rests on sexual selection (58). Roland’s attraction to Maud in Possession and Smithson’s to Sarah in The French Lieutenant’s Woman also suggest Darwin’s theory in operation. The novella repeatedly opposes dark and bright nature—in other words, death- and life-dominated nature, or chaotic and orderly nature. Sometimes, as here, it sets up contrasts between the Amazonian jungle and the English countryside and between nature and culture in general. Remembering South America, Adamson comprehends the world and his life in such binary terms, but they deconstruct—an instability in the novella—as it becomes clear how much natural disorder and death have infi ltrated the supposed high culture of Bredely Hall. While the text asserts binary distinctions, it also maintains its awareness that life is always entangled with death and that this entanglement, when acknowledged and felt in human experience, makes life particularly valuable. Captain Papagay provides the link between “Morpho Eugenia” and the shorter work, “The Conjugial Angel,” which makes up the second part of Angels and Insects. As “The Conjugial Angel” begins we learn that Papagay had long been absent from his wife and presumably lost at sea. But at the end of the story he suddenly reappears, after having been “[t]wice wrecked” and “[o]nce cast away,” his letters to Mrs. Papagay never having been delivered (289). A flesh-and-blood revenant, he returns from seeming death and so fits the subject matter of “The Conjugial Angel,” which tells a largely sympathetic story about spiritualists.

240 Notes 15. Christabel LaMotte is the exception, demonstrating that intelligence and the exercise of free will are not enough for achieving a fulfi lling life; opportunity and luck also are needed.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7 1. The main sources of information about Covington come from Darwin’s letters and brief references in other writings and from Covington’s “scrappy diary” (Mr. Darwin’s 363). 2. The full and correct title of the book is Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited during the Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle Round the World. 3. The work Darwin refers to is what he called his “Big Species Book,” begun in 1856 but discontinued, probably in June 1858, when he began the shorter Origin, which heavily mines the earlier manuscript. 4. Beer goes on to comment “that Darwin was never a singleton. He needed and used the work, information, and insights of many people to do his work and be himself” (xxxix). Darwin drew on a worldwide community of informants, carrying on a vast correspondence. It appears that he saw his former servant, after Covington’s immigration to Australia, primarily as a collector of information and specimens. And Darwin’s sense of class distinction indeed might be the reason why he does not mention Covington in any of his published writings. 5. The statement occurs in a letter to Charles Lyell from John Herschel, 20 February 1836: “[W]e must interpret it [“Scripture Chronology”] in accordance with whatever shall appear on fair enquiry to be the truth for there cannot be two truths” (emphasis original). “Darwin knew this passage well” (Desmond and Moore 215). 6. Barta does not discuss Mr. Darwin’s Shooter but rather uses the idea of colonial shootings as a springboard for arguing that Darwin’s acceptance of the inevitable demise of native peoples, based on his application of natural selection to human history, helped justify genocide; this is a problematic claim that has frequently been made. In any event, McDonald’s novel indirectly but adroitly encapsulates, through the drowning episode, the exploitation and destruction of Aborigines. 7. Clayton relates this pattern to the contemporary notion of “genome time” as “a perpetual present” (167), one of the patterns growing out of contemporary science and technology he finds paralleling those of the nineteenth century. He “wonders if the compression of past and future into a vividly particular present is not anachronistically attributed to a Victorian reader by a contemporary author caught up in today’s enthusiasm for genomics. Certainly, few nineteenth-century readers were suffused with a ‘deep contentment’ at the revelations contained in Darwin’s work” (174). But nineteenth-century awareness of geological time—like that represented in Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes—might by itself account for neo-Victorian representations of such “compression,” and although no doubt in the minority, many readers found Darwin’s vision, which vividly identifies traces of history in the phenomena of the present, appealing even if not productive of “contentment.” Nevertheless, MacCracken is an extreme case. Not only is he scientifically receptive, aware of geological time, and without religious roadblocks to Darwin’s theory, but his problematic past and future might well attract him to ideas meshing with his own “evolutionary” process in which, through his experience as an invalid in Covington’s home, he discovers satisfaction and self-acceptance in the resources of the present.

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8. That book is The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits, published in 1881. It deals with a subject Darwin had thought about throughout almost all of his professional life.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 8 1. Surprisingly, Estrin’s is the only substantive essay about Ark Baby even though, as the critic points out, the novel “was a critical success on publication” and “was short-listed for The Guardian’s Fiction Prize for 1998” (41, 55). 2. In James’s gloomy novel about a dystopian Britain of the future, women adopt and dress up kittens rather than monkeys, and the inability to reproduce is worldwide rather than local. Also, there is no Victorian narrative, although the main character is a historian of the Victorian period who inaccurately imagines it as a time of stability. 3. Mistakes, intentional or not, include making the six-foot Darwin a “small bearded man”; giving Scrapie, in 1864, knowledge of Gregor Mendel’s seminal paper on genetics, which was not published until 1866 and was virtually unknown for many years afterward; and presenting the vegetarian activist Henry Salt as a grown man at a time when he would have been a small child (306, 283, 156–57). 4. Omphalos was published two years prior to the Origin; it was not Darwinism that worried Gosse but earlier arguments, such as those made by Lamarck and Chambers, that species can transmute into new ones. 5. The head of the seminary Tobias attends offers the more reasonable view that Darwinism was just one factor affecting a religion that, along with the priesthood, was already on the decline in England: “This is a dying profession. I fear the Church is headed for extinction. And Darwinism hasn’t helped” (197). 6. The central idea of Lamarckism, that heritable characteristics are acquired through organisms’ own efforts, allows for rapid evolution without the randomness and deadly competition that made natural selection unpalatable to some believers in evolution. 7. Darwin was bothered by William Thompson’s calculations of the earth’s age, which did not allow enough time for evolution by natural selection to work as Darwin imagined. In response, he argued that while natural selection is the main process driving evolution, it is aided by “the direct action of the conditions of life” on plants and animals and by “[h]abit” or “use” (Origin 11)—essentially the Lamarckian idea that the behavior of individuals produces changes that are passed to offspring. Through the various editions of the Origin Darwin strengthened these crutches for his theory, an effort that turned out unnecessary since Thompson’s calculations were based on faulty premises about the internal heat and composition of the earth. The other problem Scrapie addresses, the seemingly sudden appearance of new species in the fossil record, Darwin deals with at great length in Chapter 9 of the Origin, “On the Imperfections of the Geological Record.” 8. Today it is generally agreed that Darwin’s metaphor for the relationship between species, an extravagantly branching tree, is far more accurate than a ladder, which implies simple lines of evolutionary change while suggesting there exists absolute standards for judging species as “higher” and “lower,” better and worse, as opposed to relativistic criteria for survival in particular environments—although a tree also suggests directionality.

242

Notes

9. The passage reads as follows: “If the cross offspring of any two races of birds or animals be interbred, will the progeny keep as constant, as that of any established breed, or will it tend to return in appearance to either parent?” (Ark 282–83; emphasis original). This quotation is from a questionnaire Darwin distributed in April and May of 1839 to various breeders, with the fi rst answer arriving on May 6. (For the questionnaire, see Darwin, Correspondence 2: 446–49.) 10. For popular accounts of punctuated equilibrium and of Goldschmidt’s hopeful monster and its implications, see Gould, “The Episodic Nature of Evolutionary Change” and “The Return of the Hopeful Monsters” in The Panda’s Thumb” (179–85, 186–93). For a more detailed discussion of Goldschmidt’s ideas, see Gould, Structure 451–66; Chapter 9 of the same book offers a lengthy defense of punctuated equilibrium in answer to Gould’s critics. 11. Among other aspects of the Victorian world, the novel references workhouses, spiritualism, ponderous furniture, preoccupation with death, Henry Salt, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the Clifton Suspension Bridge, and laudanum addiction. 12. Queen Victoria and her government were not fans of Darwin, who was never offered a knighthood but was, through the influence of his friends, buried in Westminster Abbey. As mentioned, the queen did not appreciate the connection between animals and humans she saw in the orangutan Jenny. Darwin visited Jenny several times in 1838, was impressed by her intelligence and capabilities, and in her found further evidence that humans evolved from non-humans. 13. Barbara Estrin comments, “The Gentleman Monkey overturns the theory of genetic superiority twice—in himself and his offspring Tobias. Rather than remaining ‘natural inferiors,’ (319) both father and son turn out to be morally ‘better than a man’ (320). The outcome renders Tobias the opposite of centuries-old myths perpetuated against genetic outsiders” (Estrin 49). 14. Estrin asserts that Buck “becomes a savior, the source of new life” by impregnating the twins (47). This is not quite accurate. The key to their conceptions is their genetic heritage tracing back to the evolutionary fitness of Tobias and the Gentleman Monkey, not any specialness on the part of Buck. Also, Violet, whose fertility is signaled by her lust for life and her enormous breasts “[e]ach . . . the size of a human baby”—harbingers of her twin descendants Rose and Blanche—seems also to have made a positive genetic contribution. There is no reason to think that Buck was the only one who could have tapped into the twins’ reversionary/progressive potential.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 9 1. Dyson’s novels are neither widely read nor readily obtainable outside of Australia. 2. Because of Wallace Darwin was forced to abandon his “big species book” and write the Origin, which he considered merely an abstract for the tome he still planned to publish but never did. Almost all commentators agree that the dilatory author benefited from Wallace’s intervention. 3. By the 1840s Darwin was hinting to his most trusted colleagues of his commitment to transmutation, and in the 1850s he shared his evolutionary theory with Lyell, Hooker, and Huxley. 4. The chapter epigraphs apparently are all taken from historical sources. 5. The Age of Wonder (2008) by Richard Holmes gives an “account of the second scientific revolution, which swept through Britain at the end of the

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eighteenth century, and produced a new vision which has rightly been called Romantic science” (xv). This development reverberated throughout the nineteenth century, influencing some scientists more than others. Nevertheless, neo-Victorian novels are historically accurate in assigning romantic attitudes to scientific protagonists. 6. The novel thus displays movement away from the increasing specialization of science that marked the nineteenth and twentieth century. A partial exception to this trajectory is ecology—a set of concerns that Caldwell, primed by Darwin, encounters in the outback through the power of his observations— which is strongly multidisciplinary.

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Index

A Aborigines: death and, 221–224; racism and, 84, 86, 90–92, 98, 101–104; survival of, 236n17; war against, 93–99 Ackroyd, Peter, 7, 12 Acland, Henry, 18 Adam and Eve, 34–35, 89, 100, 201 Adam and the Adamite: The Harmony of Scripture and Ethnology, 35 Adamson, William, 153–160 Affi nity, 10 Agassiz, Louis, 80 agnosticism: Darwinian theory and, 43; faith and, 126–127; views on, 20, 112, 121, 126, 147, 223, 228 Alabaster, Eugenia, 154–155 Alabaster, Sir Harald, 153–159 Alice in Wonderland, 188 angekok, 83 Angels and Insects, 1, 19, 54, 136, 153 Anning, Mary, 12, 31–34, 39–41, 54–61, 64–68, 82, 110, 134, 168, 170, 182, 225–227 antediluvians, 34–38, 232n5 aristocracy, 102, 120, 129, 153–154, 163 Aristotelian taxonomy, 57 Ark Baby, 1, 13, 19, 54, 84, 164, 184, 186, 194–210, 224 Arnold, Matthew, 9, 11, 24, 126, 132–133 Articulation of Science in the NeoVictorian Novel, The, 20 Ash, Ellen, 150 Ash, Randolph Henry, 138, 142–153, 160

atheism: Darwinian theory, 43–44; doubt and, 61–62, 69–70, 75–77; faith and, 24, 126–127; fossils and, 109; theology and, 19–20; views on, 20, 112, 121, 126–128, 147–149, 156–157, 179, 223, 228 “atheist geologists,” 87, 90, 104 Austen, Jane, 113 Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 164

B Bailey, Maud, 138, 140–146, 148, 160 Bailey, Sir George, 140 “Ballad of the Ichthyosaurus,” 3 Barnes, Julian, 7 Barrett, Andrea, 1, 79, 80, 81, 82, 108 Barrett, Susan, 94 Barta, Tony, 181 Baulk, Herbert, 150 Bawden, Liz-Anne, 116 Baxter, Godwin, 226 Beagle voyage, 163–168, 171–179, 183, 186–187, 190–191, 195, 198, 205, 215 Bennett, George, 221, 223 Bentham, Jeremy, 16 Biographer’s Tale, The, 1, 54, 136– 137, 160–162, 224 biology: biological evolution, 38, 50–51, 109, 119–120, 129–133, 145–146; biological history, 40–42, 145; education in, 65; evolutionary biology, 30–42, 50–51, 77, 119–120, 129–130, 136, 145–146, 150–153, 194–195, 207, 226; societal

254

Index

understanding and, 28, 120; study of, 3, 14–15 Black Line of 1830, 93 Black War, 93 Boccardi, Mariadele, 71, 106, 143 Boerhaave, Dr., 79–80, 82 Bone Hunter, The, 1, 55, 74–78, 109, 134, 224 “Bone Wars,” 74 Bormann, Daniel Candel, 20–21, 151 Bowen, Deborah, 127 Breyer, John, 37 Bridges, Sarah, 50–52 Brown, Ettie, 222–223 Brown, Mary, 222–224 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 9 Browning, Robert, 12, 138, 150 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom, 67, 73 Buckland, William, 38, 41, 56, 60 Buffon, Comte du, 88–89 Buffon, Georges, 18 Bunyan, John, 168, 170, 171, 172 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 36 Butcher, William, 37 Buxton, Jackie, 139 Byatt, A. S., 1, 7, 11, 13, 20, 135–145, 148, 150–154, 158–161 Byron, Lord, 219

C Cabillaud, Jacques-Yves, 205, 210, 211 Caldwell, William Hay, 218–224 Calypso, 155, 159–160 Campbell, Jane, 145 “canonized history,” 12 Carey, Peter, 7, 12, 200, 224 Carlyle, Thomas, 9, 20, 24, 214 Carnegie, Andrew, 76 Carroll, Lewis, 188 Carter, Angela, 7 Chambers, Robert, 18, 42–43, 80, 109, 157 chance: determinism and, 26, 132; in novels, 67, 115–116, 129–132, 143 character flaws, 5–6, 165, 189 Charles, Prince, 12 “Charles and the Hopeful Monster: Postmodern Evolutionary Theory,” 130–131 Chevalier, Tracy, 1, 12, 32, 55–57, 60, 65, 168, 182, 225 Christian theology, 19, 33

Christianity: fate of, 19; form of, 25, 61; morality and, 26, 111, 121; purpose of, 127; romance of, 158–160; teaching about, 95–96; views of, 28, 100, 121, 127, 156–160, 225 City of the Mind, 1, 31, 48–54, 81, 224 Clayton, Jay, 182 Collins, Wilkie, 84 colonialism, 86, 90, 97 Comte, Auguste, 16, 26 Confessing a Murder, 1, 54, 164, 195, 213–219, 224, 226 Confessions of a Justifi ed Sinner, 214 “Conjugial Angel, The,” 153 Connexion of Geology with Religion Explained, 60 Conrad, Joseph, 31, 43–48 contingency: historical contingency, 55, 123, 132, 180, 198, 208; in novels, 90, 114, 130–132, 138 Conybeare, William, 41, 56 Cope, Edward Drinker, 74, 76–78 Covington, Syms, 163–184, 197 creationism, 17, 67–68, 169, 200–201, 220 Crimson Petal and the White, The, 10 “crisis of faith”: experiences of, 15–28, 33, 56, 59–61, 66–74, 167, 184, 202–204; spiritual crisis, 6, 63, 66, 71, 234n5; versions of, 195, 213–214 “critical philosophy,” 146–147, 149 Crompton, Mattie, 155–160 Cropper, Mortimer, 148, 152 Cuisine Zoologique, 205 Curiosity: A Love Store, 225 Curry, Captain, 59

D “Darkling Thrush, The,” 125 Darnton, John, 225 Darwin, Charles, 1, 12–21, 27, 29, 41–47, 53–54, 65, 68–69, 75–76, 79, 109, 118–122, 140–142, 151, 156–161, 163– 170, 179, 184–185, 195–198, 200–204, 210–211, 214–221, 224, 226 Darwin, Erasmus, 18, 79, 215 Darwin Conspiracy, The, 226 Darwin Loves You, 29 Darwin the Writer, 29

Index Darwinian evolution: dismissing, 17; doubt and, 159, 177–178; existentialism and, 110–111; occurrence of, 118, 129, 159; opposition to, 80, 204; views on, 28–30, 40–42, 67–68, 109, 236n2. See also evolution Darwinian experiences, 21–22, 27–28, 65, 109, 123, 215–218 Darwinian revolution, 6, 21–22, 55, 108–110 Darwinian romanticism, 125, 136, 197 Darwinian theory: agnosticism and, 43; atheism and, 43–44; basis for, 15, 21–22, 65, 136, 189; evidence and, 109; fossils and, 189; opposition to, 47, 50, 166; postmodernism and, 153; secularism and, 42–43; time required for, 204; views on, 117, 156–158, 163 Darwinism: meaning of, 118, 119; postmodernism and, 129; social Darwinism, 76, 109, 165, 210, 231n24 Dawkins, Richard, 20, 77–78 Dawkins, William Paley, 75, 77–78, 134 “Day of Judgment,” 147 De la Beche, Henry, 41, 56, 225–226 Denton, Mrs., 96–97 Descent of Man, The, 27, 120, 224 Desmond, Adrian, 40 Destiny of Nations, The, 101, 102, 103 determinism, 26, 132 “Devil’s chaplain,” 163, 166, 184, 220 DeVitis, A. A., 115 Dickens, Charles, 9, 12, 18 dinosaurs, 40, 44, 49, 74, 194– 195, 208. See also fossils; ichthyosaurus Diski, Jenny, 1, 164, 165, 184, 186, 195 disorder: indeterminacy and, 153; order and, 141–148, 192 Donne, John, 133 double narratives, 12, 54, 57 “Dover Beach,” 11, 24, 69, 78, 126 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 36 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 85 Dracula, 85 Drayson, Nicholas, 1, 164, 186, 195, 214, 217, 218 Duncan, Isabelle, 35

255

E Eagleton, Terry, 22 earth, age of, 35, 85, 88–89, 166, 241n7 ecological views, 2, 21, 27–28, 124, 160–161, 224 Elam, Diane, 139 Eldredge, Niles, 207 Eliot, George, 9, 20, 121, 147 Eliot, T. S., 9 Elsmere, Robert, 23–26, 28 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 219 English Passengers, 1, 7, 22–23, 54, 79, 81, 84–109, 134, 206 “entangled bank” imagery, 46–47, 122–123, 140–146 environmentalism, 27–28, 82, 160–161 Eskimos, 79–84 Essays and Reviews, 147 Essence of Christianity, 147 Estrin, Barbara L., 196–197 ethics: humanism and, 2–8; nature and, 27–28; in neo-Victorian novels, 13–14, 23, 27; return to, 27, 73; trauma and, 73 Ever After, 1, 3, 11, 22–23, 39, 52, 55, 61–74, 78, 84, 109, 111, 134, 142, 209 evolution: biological evolution, 38, 50–51, 109, 119–120, 129–133, 145–146; creationism and, 17, 67–68, 169, 200–201, 220; natural order and, 16, 21, 68, 75; natural selection and, 16–17, 118–119, 165, 168, 183, 203, 210, 214, 220, 226; paleontology and, 75, 112; postmodernism and, 129–131, 136–137, 153, 194; secularism and, 111–113, 130–132; theory of, 15–18, 21, 25–26, 40–43, 75, 109, 130, 137, 156–158, 163–167, 195–203, 207, 214– 215, 226. See also Darwinian evolution “Evolution and Ethics,” 76, 210 evolutionary change, 16, 50, 123, 180, 207, 241n8 evolutionary development, 4, 47, 131, 158, 180, 197, 206 evolutionary transformation, 142 existentialism, 29, 110–111, 119–124, 129–134, 236n3, 237n8

256

Index

extinct species: evolutionary biology and, 194–195, 207, 226; geology and, 175, 179; ichthyosaurus, 31–54; significance of, 59, 88, 113; study of, 3–4, 18

F Faber, Michel, 10 Fairly, Fred, 225 faith: agnosticism and, 126–127; atheism and, 24, 126–127; crisis of, 6, 15–28, 33, 56, 59–61, 66–74, 108, 111, 162–163, 184, 202, 213–214; fossils and, 55–78; loss of, 21, 28, 62, 67, 70–74, 226; romance and, 136, 149–153, 158–160; romanticism and, 82, 125, 152–153 Farrell, J. G., 7, 224 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 147, 158 Figuier, Louis, 37 fittest, survival of, 44, 76, 99, 118, 121, 196 Fitzgerald, Penelope, 7, 225 Fitzpiers, Edgar, 45 Fitzroy, Charlotte, 186–193 FitzRoy, Robert, 163–175, 185–194, 197, 226 FitzRoy of the Beagle, 186–187 Fleshless Chef, The, 205 fossil-collecting, 3–5, 12 fossils: atheism and, 109; Darwinian theory and, 189; faith and, 55–78; geology and, 55–78, 80, 85–92, 133–134; of ichthyosaurs, 31–37, 41–44, 48–54; obsession with, 122, 126; significance of, 110, 113–116, 133–134, 142–143; as symbols, 116–117 Fowles, John, 1, 7, 108–111, 115–116, 119–123, 126–134, 136, 151, 200 fractals, 192–194 Frankenstein, 226 Franklin, Sir John, 79 Freeman, Ernestina, 110, 113–116, 120–121, 126–130 French Lieutenant’s Woman, The, 1, 23, 29, 51, 54, 84, 108–137, 142, 146, 151, 200, 209, 224 Freud, Sigmund, 187–190 Frobisher, Martin, 81

Funk, Wolfgang, 95

G Galapagos, 161, 168, 176, 190, 198, 216–217 Galileo, 15, 152–153 Garden of Eden, 86, 89, 103, 106, 122–123, 178 Gardner, Martin, 132 Gate of Angels, 225 Gatherings of a Naturalist, 221 genetics, 192–193, 196, 215 Gentleman Monkey, 195–201, 205–211 geology: education in, 65; evolutionary biology and, 30–42, 150–153; extinction and, 175, 179; fossils and, 55–78, 80, 85–92, 133– 134; paleontology and, 30–32, 56, 80; societal understanding and, 28; study of, 3, 14–18, 37–39, 48, 109; theory of evolution and, 165–166 Geology and Mineralogy: Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, 38 Gilbert, W. S., 186 God’s Funeral, 18 Goldschmidt, Richard, 206 Gosse, Edmund, 200 Gosse, Philip, 53, 57, 200, 201 Gould, Stephen Jay, 20, 130, 206–207 Gray, Alasdair, 214, 226 Great Expectations, 12 Great Flood, 88, 178, 198, 209–212 Grogan, Dr., 125 Gutleben, Christian, 21–23, 49, 65, 73

H Hadley, Louisa, 10, 11 Hamlet, 62, 70, 74 Hampton, Claudia, 53 Hardy, Thomas, 3–5, 18, 20, 26, 31, 35, 43–48, 57, 116, 124–125 Harp, Jack, 105 Heart of Darkness, 31, 43–44, 46–47 Heilmann, Ann, 6, 7 Herschel, John, 179 Herschel, William, 88 Higher Criticism, 15, 24, 75, 147–149, 158, 230n14 historical contingency, 55, 123, 132, 180, 198, 208

Index historical fiction: “canonized history,” 12; characteristics of, 1, 7, 10–11; settings for, 10–13, 54, 110. See also neo-Victorian fiction historiographic metafiction, 8–9, 11, 137–138 historiography, 2, 12–13, 19, 209 history, reconstructing: fossils and, 48–53; geology and, 37–39, 48; ichthyosaurus and, 31–54; natural theology and, 34–38 Hitchens, Christopher, 20 Hogg, James, 214 Holland, Mathew, 49–52, 54 Holland, Tom, 1, 55, 74, 77 Holmes, Frederick M., 138 Hooker, Joseph, 216 “hopeful monster,” 130–131 “Horizontality of Existence,” 121 Hulme, T. E., 125 humanism, 2–5, 149, 224 “Humpty Dumpty Effect,” 192 Hutcheon, Linda, 8, 137–138, 153 Hutton, James, 39 Huxley, Thomas, 27, 42–43, 75–76, 142, 191, 210, 215

I ichthyosaurus: discovery of, 31–32, 226–227; exhibits of, 39–40; extinction and, 31–54; fossils of, 31–37, 41–44, 48–54; observing, 3, 51–54; significance of, 48–52, 58–67, 70–74; study of, 31–54, 110 Ichthyosaurus platyodon, 110 In Memoriam, 18, 24, 44, 127, 157 indeterminacy: change and, 129; disorder and, 153; in novels, 6–7, 129–130, 133, 145, 190; relativism and, 129, 137, 153, 190

J Jack Maggs, 10, 12 Jackson, Tony E., 119, 130–131 James, William, 29 Jameson, Frederic, 22 Jensen, Liz, 1, 13, 164, 184–186, 194–199, 202, 205–208 Journal of Researches, 164 Journey into the Interior of Earth, 34 Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 31, 33–34, 39, 43

257

Jurassic Park, 36

K Keats, John, 3 Kelvin, Lord, 88 Kewley, Illiam Quillian, 84–99, 103 Kimbell, May, 3 Kneale, Matthew, 1, 7, 22, 79, 84, 86, 89–90, 94–105, 108 Knight, Henry, 3–5, 26, 57–59 Knox, Robert, 98–101 kobolds, 226–227 Kohlke, Marie-Luise, 6–7, 22–23 Kurtz, 46–48

L La terre avant le deluge, 37 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 18, 76, 109 LaMotte, Christabel, 138, 140, 142–144, 146–153 Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, The, 12 “law of God,” 175 “Lay of the Trilobite, The,” 3 Lea, Daniel, 74 Levine, George, 28–29, 52, 107, 125, 152, 197, 224 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 82 Life of Jesus, The, 147 Linnaean taxonomy, 57, 122, 125 Lionheart, Richard, 12 Lively, Penelope, 1, 31, 48–50, 53, 81 Livingstone, David N., 35 Llewellyn, Mark, 6, 7 Love and the Platypus, 1, 54, 195, 213–214, 217–224 Lukács, Georg, 11 Lusin, Caroline, 89 Lyell, Charles, 18, 39, 53, 56, 68, 75, 80, 109, 126, 142, 150–151, 190, 221 Lyme Regis, 32, 55–56, 64–66, 75, 110–113, 131, 142, 194, 226

M MacCracken, Dr., 168, 173, 176–184 Magwitch, 12 Malcolm, David, 73 Malleson, Frederick Amadeus, 34–37 Malthus, Thomas, 221 Mandelbrot, Benoit, 192 Marlow, 46–48 Marsh, Othniel Charles, 74, 76–78 Marx, Karl, 187, 189

258 Index Master, The, 12 material reality, 6, 14, 22, 230n13 M’Causland, Dominick, 35 McDonald, Roger, 1, 12, 163–164, 166–167, 175, 177–179, 181, 183–184 McEwan, Ian, 11 “Meditation XVII,” 133 Melbury, Grace, 44–46 Mellersh, H. E. L., 186 Merrill, Lynn L., 33 mesmerism, 19, 102 metafictional novels, 7–11, 62, 137, 214, 237n7 metamorphosis, 149, 159 Middleton, Joey, 172, 174–175, 181–183 Mill, John Stuart, 9, 27 Miller, Hugh, 53 Mitchell, Kate, 7, 138–139 Mitchell, Roland, 138, 140–146, 148, 160 Monkey’s Uncle, 1, 54, 164–165, 184–195, 224 “Mont Blanc,” 52 Moon Tiger, 53 Moonstone, The, 84 morality: Christian morality, 26, 111, 121; evolutionary morality, 26; ideas of, 13, 106; identity and, 26–27, 71; issues of, 26–27, 173 “Morpho Eugenia,” 1, 136, 153–160 Morton, Samuel George, 81 Mr. Darwin’s Shooter, 1, 12, 54, 163–170, 175, 179, 184–185, 197, 200, 224 multi-narratives, 84 Musgrove, Louisa, 113

N Nanson, Phineas G., 160–161 natural order: determinacy and, 83–84; evolution and, 16, 21, 68, 75; faith and, 28; historiography and, 12–13; natural theology and, 121; taxonomy and, 57 natural selection: acceptance of, 43, 240n6; chanciness of, 50; evolution by, 16–17, 118–119, 165, 168, 203, 210, 214, 220, 226; process of, 41–43, 68–69, 76, 157, 178; replacing, 88 Natural Theology, 221

natural theology: crisis of faith and, 66–68; history and, 34–38; natural order and, 16, 121; paleontology and, 41; theory of evolution and, 166 nature: ethics and, 27–28; evolution and, 27; humans and, 27–28; nurture and, 26, 169; observer of, 116 neo-Victorian fiction: characteristics of, 9–13; defi ning, 6–11; description of, 7–14; ethics and, 13–14, 23, 27; historical fiction and, 1, 7, 10–13, 54, 110; hybridity of, 63, 119–120. See also neo-Victorian novels neo-Victorian novels: appearance of, 8; characteristics of, 1–4, 9–14; defi ning, 6–11; description of, 7–14; ethics and, 13–14, 23, 27; genres of, 9–11, 85, 169; lessons of, 113, 134–135; postmodernism and, 8–14, 119, 129, 137–139, 234n5, 238n2; science-religion relationship in, 1–4, 8, 13–30, 40, 48–53, 213–214, 224–228. See also specific novels Neptunism, 39, 232n8 Neumeier, Beate, 10, 138 Newton, Isaac, 16, 77

O Odyssey, The, 155 “Old Fossil Shop,” 110 Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot, 57, 200–201 On Chesil Beach, 11 On Population, 221 On the Origin of Species, 16–18, 25–29, 37, 41–42, 67–69, 109, 120, 125, 140, 147, 161–164, 167, 176–177, 186, 191, 201– 202, 210, 215, 221–224, 227 orangutans, 186–191, 194 order: chaos and, 121, 141–146, 159, 192–194; determinacy and, 83–84; disorder and, 141–148, 192; natural order, 12–13, 16, 28, 57, 68, 75, 83–84, 121 “ordering principle,” 144, 153 Origin, The, 164, 166 Oscar and Lucinda, 200, 224–225 Owen, Richard, 31, 40–43, 48–51, 54, 76, 80, 101, 191, 221

Index Oxford Movement, 24, 61, 112–113

P Padian, Kevin, 116 Pair of Blue Eyes, A, 3–5, 35, 57 paleontology: evolution and, 75, 112; geology and, 30–32, 56, 80; natural theology and, 41; study of, 14–15, 18, 48, 80, 110 Paley, William, 16–17, 37, 75, 157, 221 Palmer, William J., 115 paradise: alternative paradise, 106; of comfort, 154, 159; false paradise, 155; lost paradise, 66, 79, 81, 89, 106, 108, 125; mythic paradise, 123 Pearce, Matthew, 3, 61–74, 78, 109, 111, 134, 182 Peevay, 84–107, 134 Persuasion, 113 Peyrère, Isaac de la, 34–35 Phelps, Tobias, 195–212 Philpot, Elizabeth, 56–58, 60, 68 Phipps, John, 171–180, 183 phrenology, 19, 102, 174 physiognomy, 19, 102 Pilgrim’s Progress, The, 168, 170, 178 platypuses, 217–224 Plutonism, 39, 232n8 Pohler, Eva Mokry, 121 Poor Things, 214, 226 Possession, 1, 11–12, 19–21, 54, 136–154, 160, 209, 224, 226 postmodernism: criticism of, 137–138, 153; evolution and, 129–131, 136–137, 153, 194; interpreting, 8–12, 22–23; neo-Victorian novels and, 8–14, 119, 129, 137–139, 234n5, 238n2; postsecularism and, 30, 231n25; poststructuralism and, 129, 144, 160, 238n3; realism and, 11, 110, 238n2; relativism and, 23, 129–131, 137, 153; romance and, 137–139, 146, 161; secularism and, 23, 30, 231n25 postsecularism, 30, 231n25 poststructuralism, 129, 144, 160, 238n3 Potter, Thomas, 84–107, 206 Pouchet, R. A., 226–227 Poulteney, Mrs., 113, 124 Pre-Adamite Earth, The, 38 Pre-Adamite Man, 35, 38

259

pre-Adamite theory, 34–36, 140, 232n5 Preston, Peter, 10, 110, 131 Prichard, James Cowles, 98 Princess Ida, 186 Principles of Geology, 18, 39, 68, 80, 150, 221 Proof against the Atheisms of Geology, 89 psychological transformation, 127–128 Punch, 3

R Races of Men, The, 98 racism: aborigines and, 84, 86, 90–92, 98, 101–104; attacking, 222; supporting, 15, 35 racist theories, 84, 98–100 racist violations, 97, 106 Randolph, Paschal Beverly, 35 realism, 11, 110, 238n2 “referentiality,” 89–90 relativism: indeterminacy and, 129, 137, 153, 190; postmodernism and, 23, 129–131, 137, 153 Remarkable Creatures, 1, 12, 32, 55–61, 65, 68, 109, 134, 142, 200, 225 Renshaw, Timothy, 84–85, 95, 107 retro-Victorian fiction, 1, 6–8, 21–22, 49 Rhys, Jean, 7 Rob Roy, 12 Robert Elsmere, 23–26, 28, 213 Robinson, George Augustus, 94–95 romance: “entangled bank” imagery, 140–146; with entomology, 155; faith and, 136, 149–153, 158–160; in novels, 136–154; postmodernism and, 137–139, 146, 161; religion and, 136, 149–153, 159–160; science and, 136 romantic love: crisis of faith and, 66–68, 71; in neo-Victorian fiction, 61–74; postmodernism and, 137 romanticism: Darwinian romanticism, 125, 136, 197; faith and, 82, 125, 152–153; forms of, 224; humanism and, 149, 224; neoromanticism, 136; simplistic romanticism, 161; Wordsworthian romanticism, 125

260 Index Ross, Michael, 85, 105 Rupke, Nicolaas, 41 Ruse, Michael, 29 Ruskin, John, 9, 18, 20, 24

S Salt, Henry, 205 Sartor Resartus, 214 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 132–133 Saville, Buck de, 195, 206, 209, 210 Scala Naturae, 122 Schwartzberg, Johann, 81–82 science: defi ning, 14, 233n10; forms of, 14–18; societal understanding and, 28 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels, 27, 29, 214 Scott, Sir Walter, 11, 12 Scrapie, Charlotte, 195–196, 208–212 Scrapie, Ivanhoe, 195 Scrapie, Violet, 195–196, 204–205, 210–211 “Sea of Faith,” 24, 126 secularism: Darwinian theory and, 42–43; evolution and, 111–113, 130–132; faith and, 213–214; neo-Victorian novels and, 28–30; postmodernism and, 23, 30, 231n25; spiritualism and, 18–20; views on, 228 self-transformation, 4 sexual behaviors, 111–113, 154–155, 161, 173–174, 215–217 sexual exploitation, 7 sexual selection, 158, 239n12 Shakespeare, William, 164 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 52 Shiller, Dana, 8 Shuttleworth, Sally, 6, 8, 21–22, 139 Siege of Krishnapur, The, 224–225 Sincerity, 84–85, 90–94, 97, 99, 106 Smith, William, 53 Smithson, Charles, 110–117, 120–134 social Darwinism, 76, 109, 165, 210, 231n24 social flaws, 5–6, 189 social justice, 7, 13–14, 110, 226–227 “Song of Myself,” 77 Sources of the Self, 27 Spencer, Herbert, 16 spiritual crisis, 6, 63, 66, 71, 234n5. See also “crisis of faith” spiritualism, 18–20, 102, 143, 150– 151, 174

Steveker, Lena, 148 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 85 Stoker, Bram, 85 Stone, Irving, 164, 166 Strauss, David, 147, 225 supernaturalism, 2, 14, 128, 208, 238n1 “survival of the fittest,” 44, 76, 99, 118, 121, 196 “Swammerdam,” 145, 152 Swammerdam, Jan, 152–153 Swift, Graham, 1, 3, 7, 11, 20, 39, 52, 55, 61, 65, 73–74, 134, 154, 182, 184

T Tasmanian aborigines: racism and, 84, 86, 90–92, 98, 101–104; survival of, 236n17; war against, 93–99 Taylor, Charles, 27 Tempest, The, 164 Tennyson, Alfred, 18, 20, 24, 44, 152, 157 theology: Christian theology, 19, 33; natural theology, 16, 34–38, 41, 66–68, 121, 166 theory of evolution. See evolution: theory of Theory of the Novel, The, 11 This Thing of Darkness, 1, 23, 54, 163–166, 184, 186, 190–191 Thomas, Joan, 225 Thompson, Harry, 1, 163–166, 184, 191 Thompson, William, 88 Thoreau, Henry David, 77, 219 Through the Looking Glass, 188, 192 Time Machine, The, 43 “To Marguerite—Continued,” 133 Tóibín, Colm, 7, 12 Torrens, Hugh S., 116 tragedy, 114–116 transcendentalism, 41–42, 50, 77, 80, 101 transformation: change and, 4, 127–128, 142, 151, 228; evolutionary transformation, 142; psychological transformation, 127–128; self-transformation, 4 Trapp, Horace, 205 trauma, 6–7, 21–23, 73 “Tree of Life,” 45 True History of the Kelly Gang, 12 tupilaq, 83

Index U “Unfulfi lled Intention,” 44, 46 Universe or The Wonders of Creation, 226 Unwin, Bill, 3, 61–74, 111, 134, 154

V Vandieman, George, 95 vegetarianism, 199–200, 204–206, 210 Verne, Jules, 31, 33–40, 43–44 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 18, 42, 80, 109 Victoria, Queen, 13, 186, 195, 201, 211 Victorians: defi ning, 6, 229n6; traits of, 2–6, 86, 105 Voorhees, Zeke, 79, 81–83 Voyage au centre de la Terre, 33–34 Voyage of the Narwhal, The, 1, 54, 77, 79–84, 96, 103, 106, 109, 134, 224

W Wallace, Alfred, 214–216 Walyeric, 94–98, 103, 106

261

Ward, Mrs. Humphrey, 23–26, 213 Waterland, 20 Waters, Sarah, 7, 10, 12, 13 Weber, Max, 29 Wedgewood, Emma, 215 Wedgewood, Josiah, 215 Wells, Erasmus Darwin, 79–84, 134, 215 Wells, H. G., 43 Wesseling, Elisabeth, 9, 12 Whitman, Walt, 77 Wilberforce, Bishop, 191 Wilson, A. N., 18–19 Wilson, E. O., 28 Wilson, Geoff rey, 84–93, 97–98, 102–108 Winterbourne, Giles, 45–46 Woman in White, The, 84 Woodlanders, The, 31, 43–45, 47 Woodruff, Sarah, 110, 113–118, 120–134 Wordsworthian romanticism, 125

Y Young, George, 38