This is part two of a dissertation. Part one may be found here.
In 1871 Charles Darwin published The Descent Of Man, from which his cousin, Sir Francis Galton drew inspiration and this chapter will discuss the origins of the science known as "eugenics" in Victorian Britain and how its principles laid out by Sir Francis Galton influence the novelists of the time. Gillham remarks,
Eugenics ... deals with "questions bearing on what is termed in Greek,
eugenes, namely, good in stock, hereditarily endowed with noble qualities."
And so Galton had brought into the vocabulary a word whose dark connotations
have ever since been associated with his name. (Gillham 2001, 207)
Charles Darwin in The Descent Of Man (1871) states,
'We civilised men ... do our utmost to check the process of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor laws and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment ... Thus the weak members of society propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man (Darwin cited in Gallagher, 1996: 76)' (Marks, 1999: 34)
This argument that not allowing people with disabilities to live or die according to natural selection without anybody helping those members of society most in need of aid carried a great deal of weight in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The view that comparing the breeding of animals to produce better stock can be likened to the selective breeding of humans is too simplistic. According to Gallagher,
just what constitutes survival, strength or weakness in the human race is a complex issue with many ramifications. The relationship between prosperity in an industrialised society and survival and selection in the natural chain of evolution is not as clear as the first evolution enthusiasts believed it to be. (Gallagher, 1990: 77. cited in Marks, 1999:34)
That is to say; controlling the breeding of humans to eradicate undesirable traits, mental and physical impairments for example, is extremely complicated. Selective breeding may produce unexpected and potentially disastrous results. Gallagher is also saying that the ability to acquire wealth, power or status is not necessarily as clearly related to natural evolution as early supporters of selective breeding believed.
Since the ideas behind eugenics were very prominently featured in the public arena, it is logical that writers will be influenced by the debate. It would be difficult to establish a "middle-ground", as it were, about such an emotive subject. That is to say, it is reasonable to suggest that opinions would be either strongly in favour or vehemently opposed to the idea. It would be difficult to imagine that all writers of fiction occupied the same camp either for or against eugenics.
In 1883 Galton published "Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development"
where he pulled together the results of his twin studies, his thoughts
on anthropometries and statistics, and touched upon topics like psychometrics,
psychology, race, and population. It was in this book that he coined the
term "eugenics." (Gillham 2001, 7)
Galton applied the term to the science of breeding out those members of society who, if allowed to reproduce unchecked, would threaten the survival of the human race. Gillian Beer remarks,
'Francis Galton's eugenic theories were an attempt to apply evolutionary theory to the future and Darwin's own emphasis in The Descent Of Man (1871) upon acts of choice and will in sexual selection (however circumscribed by society's pressures) brought into the foreground questions of inheritance.' (Beer, 1983:191).
In the nineteenth century, eugenicists stated that aspects of physical appearance could identify those that needed to be prevented from reproducing.
According to Janet Browne, "Criminologists such as the Italian writer Cesare Lombroso proposed that there were physical stigmata to be seen in social deviants. These were sometimes explicitly linked with apish bodily features" (Browne 2006, 124-125). In the late nineteenth century, as Browne tells us,
The same threat of physical and moral degeneration was taken up ... by
Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case Of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) where Jekyll's other self, the evil Hyde, progressively became more apelike as his murderous deeds increased. (Browne 2006, 125)
Mr Hyde is described by Stevenson as, "pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation" (Stevenson 1886, 59). In another story by Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883), Jim describes his apprehension when asked to watch for a one-legged man.
How that personage haunted my dreams ... Now the leg would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous kind of a creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the middle of his body. (Stevenson 1883, 16).
