Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (review)

Periodicals can defend, construct, and flout standards of respectability, and although Gowan Dawson's Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability is not primarily about periodical literature, there is much in it to interest readers of VPR. Dawson focuses largely on the context and reception of scientific and literary works, and some of his most interesting points are illustrated by tracing critical disputes through the pages of numerous periodicals, from the famous quarterlies to the free-thought weekly National Reformer.

Dawson effectively shows how, from the 1860s to the fin de siècle, Darwin and his supporters had to consciously and carefully manage their public reputations, in order to defend their evolutionary theories against insinuations of immorality. Yet Darwinists, or their theories, frequently came into unwelcome proximity (sometimes in the pages of periodicals, sometimes in person) with aesthetes, radical freethinkers, and others who possessed morally dubious reputations. Dawson initially introduces some of the attempts that were made to keep Darwinism respectable, such as bowdlerizing Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871), and identifies some links between Darwinists and aesthetic writers, for example the Fortnightly Review's publication of works by both groups. This is built upon in the next two chapters, which show how the language used to condemn aesthetic poetry was identical to that used in hostile reviews of Darwinist writings, and how both attracted charges of amorality and materialism. Despite rigorous attempts to remain inoffensive, The Descent of Man drew criticism for its sexual subject matter and became associated with the supposedly depraved poetry of Swinburne, whose Songs Before Sunrise was published in the same year. Criticism of John Tyndall's 1874 Belfast Address was delivered in similar language, and for strikingly similar reasons, to criticism of Walter Pater's controversial Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), both drawing accusations of Epicurean sensuality and pagan immorality. Dawson also explores implicit and explicit depictions of sexuality in popular responses to Darwinism, from Punch cartoons to evolution-inspired pornography.

In Chapter 4, Dawson discusses how scientific works, such as William Benjamin Carpenter's Principles of Human Physiology (1855), were appropriated by freethinkers (particularly Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh) to promote and defend their own radical views on issues such as birth control, and thus came under scrutiny of the Obscene Publications Act. Chapter 5 gives a fascinating account of how the atheist, freethinking mathematician William Kingdon Clifford's posthumous reputation was managed by his wife and friends through a careful reprinting, editing, publicizing, or suppressing of his works in such a way as to create a more respectable image. Finally, Dawson explores how Darwinists such as Thomas Henry Huxley and Henry Maudsley distanced themselves from the aesthetic movement by authoritatively diagnosing aesthetes as pathological degenerates (notwithstanding the distinctly aesthetic undertones of Huxley's views on artistic beauty).

Despite the fact that Darwin studies has become such a vast and crowded field in recent decades, Dawson's contribution, particularly the perceptive connections he makes between the publication of scientific and aesthetic works, is both innovative and worthy of attention.