Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Writing (review)

Many histories of the Victorian articulation of the culture idea have been written and rewritten in the half-century since Raymond Williams’s groundbreaking work on that subject appeared, and while most of those works have, like Williams’s, been primarily concerned with political and humanistic discourse, some have made the emergence of social sciences such as anthropology and economics a main part of the story they tell. (One thinks in particular of works by George Stocking, Robert J. C. Young, and James Buzard.) David Amigoni’s innovative and detailed study goes further still in this direction by tracing the roots of Victorian culture talk into scientific debates taking place in such disciplines as geology and biology: debates inextricable in the era from discussions of politics, theology, proto-anthropology, and imaginative literature. Thus, centrally, while Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution has always been understood as having had immediate and vast cultural impact, Amigoni registers how it effected, while responding to, changes in the very idea of culture. As a result, he develops a fresh perspective on the often-told story of what carries over from Erasmus Darwin and Thomas Malthus through Charles Darwin to T. H. Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace, while making literary artists from Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth to Matthew Arnold, Samuel Butler, and Edmund Gosse very much a part of that narrative. Amigoni thus shows the culture concept’s development and evolution’s emergence to have been coeval processes.

Amigoni brings the disparate writers he treats into focus together in large part by locating in all of their works a preoccupation with the relationship between the colonies and home. So while few readers will be surprised by the scientific and medical intertexts that Amigoni locates for the polymathic Coleridge’s On the Constitution of Church and State (1830), many will be struck by how those intertexts reinforce references to John Crawfurd’s ethnographies of the Malay archipelago in ways that naturalize Coleridge’s argument for Britain as a highly cultivated, or even evolved, idea. (Coleridge, Amigoni notes, writes of the “idea” of government as having a “line of evolution” [qtd. in Amigoni 51].) And while it is not an entirely new argument for Amigoni to make, most readers will I think be startled by the particulars of Amigoni’s convincing demonstration that Wordsworth’s long philosophical blank-verse poem The Excursion (1814) provided Victorian scientists with a crucial matrix within which to organize their ideas about differential cultural development. With The Excursion, Amigoni argues, Wordsworth set out to revise Erasmus Darwin’s cosmology in the direction of greater piety. Wordsworth’s poem thence provided much food for thought for Charles Darwin in the finely grained debates it stages over the question, “Our origin, what matters it?” (qtd. in Amigoni 66), while its call for “authentic tidings of invisible things” would be quoted repeatedly by George Henry Lewes in his Studies of Animal Life (qtd. in Amigoni 117). What seems especially fresh here is Amigoni’s suggestion that when Wordsworth, in The Excursion, framed such investigations within a context of colonial mission, he influenced how Darwin and then Wallace would choose imperial travel as the mode in which they would pursue their scientific agendas. By the 1860s and 1870s, the colonial scenes dramatized by Wallace and his sometime associate Crawfurd would provide crucial discursive context for arguments about metropolitan affairs such as Arnold’s in Culture and Anarchy (1869). Finally, Amigoni suggests, the dynamics of evolutionary theory would provide the logic for the new, intensely colonial understandings of metropolitan print culture and its practitioners offered by the late Victorians Butler and Gosse. In literary works as different as Erewhon (1872) and Father and Son (1907), those authors offer, Amigoni shows, ironic anthropologies of what they claim to be biological destinies.

Amigoni’s book has less narrative thrust than the...