The Doctrine of Survivals, the Great Mutiny, and Lady Audley's Secret

Abstract

The key principle of Victorian cultural anthropology, the doctrine of obsolescent “survivals,” had as its Gothic counterpart the implication that atavistic residues of early human stages could persist in modernity and might at any moment unexpectedly resurface. One crystallizing event in the evolutionary history of this theme was the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and one text that translated this lesson of the Mutiny most powerfully for popular thinking was Mary Elizabeth Braddon's famous sensation novel Lady Audley's Secret (1861-62).