Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability, by Gowan Dawson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability Rebecca Stott (bio) Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability, by Gowan Dawson; pp. 282. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007, £50.00, $90.00. In 1854 Thomas Huxley began a savage review of the still anonymously authored tenth edition of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) with a line from Macbeth: "time was, that when the brain was out the man would die," implying, of course, that the "pretentious nonsense" espoused by the book should have been long dead. Huxley was especially creative and effective in his use of Shakespeare to disparage his opponents. Literature was part of his armoury as well as part of his theatrical, rhetorical effects. Gowan Dawson's book shows us again and again that Huxley was not alone in his use of literary allusion as gunfire and cannon-shot. The history of what one 1871 contributor to the Edinburgh Review described as the "storm of mingled wrath, wonder and admiration" created by Darwinism has been scrupulously documented. Books on the reception of Darwinism and its assimilation and transformation into various cultural forms now fill shelf after shelf of the history of science sections of great libraries. This makes it all the more remarkable that the terrain chosen by Dawson in Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability constitutes a dark and fascinating corner in the Darwin industry, one that is dimly lit if not unlit. Dawson begins by examining the widely accepted claim that Darwinism, unlike some previous incarnations of transmutation, depended for its acceptance on the impeccable respectability of its principle exponents. Dawson doesn't challenge this claim, but rather sheds new light on the great struggle that took place to establish and maintain that respectability. He documents the long-running campaigns to discredit Darwinism and other forms of materialism mobilised by a wide range of opponents, drawing on a broad range of sources including journalism, scientific books and lectures, sermons, radical pamphlets, aesthetic and comic verse, and even pornography. Dawson reads the reception of Darwinism—and scientific naturalism more broadly, including the work of John Tyndall and W. K. Clifford—in new and interesting ways. He is concerned with strategies and boundaries, with the fashioning not of individuals but of intellectual respectability and its obverse. He asks about the strategies of Darwin's opponents: how did they seek to discredit these big and bold new ideas? Which methods of discrediting [End Page 339] worked and which didn't work? He follows these questions by looking at how the supporters of Darwinism played out their own strategies to realign their ideas with respectability. For the Victorian opponents of Darwinism, of course, it wasn't enough to say Darwinism heretically challenged the Biblical record. To be certain of the mud sticking, Darwinism's opponents worked hard to associate it with an additional range of seriously disreputable ideas: paganism, promiscuous and unrestrained sexuality, and all things French. A. C. Swinburne and later the poets of the aesthetic movement proved especially useful for their associations with all three: Dawson shows us reviewers, essayists, and lecturers repeatedly disparaging scientific naturalism, materialism, and Darwinism by association with Swinburne and aestheticism. Dawson also reveals the efforts of Darwinists to uncouple Darwinism and scientific naturalism from the transgressive excesses of aesthetic literature and art. In making this case, Dawson advances two other significant arguments. First, he challenges uncritically celebratory readings of the discursive interchanges between literature and science (informed by Robert M. Young's schema of the loss of an erstwhile "common context" brought about by the increasing specialisation of science) by showing that not all such alignments and interchanges were creative and mutually beneficial: literature could be used to discredit science and science to discredit literature. Secondly Dawson claims that "from the late 1860s attention shifted increasingly from general concerns with political propriety to specific anxieties over sexual respectability, and it was actually Darwin's surprisingly recurrent connection with sexual immorality . . . which emerged as perhaps the most significant impediment to establishing a naturalistic worldview as a morally acceptable alternative to earlier theological outlooks. These iniquitous associations, moreover, would prove remarkably difficult to shake off" (4). This branch of cultural history is an...