The Royal Red-Headed Variant: The Prisoner of Zenda and the 1893 Heredity Debates

The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) was conceived and written as the “heredity debates” between Herbert Spencer and August Weismann raged in the popular press. This “light” adventure novel can be seen as being influenced by Weismann in that the hero benefits from unchanging heredity traits that allow him to take the place of his distant cousin, a king, and rescue him from his captors. What is more, Rudolf Rassendyll springs from “hybrid” blood, which runs counter to much Victorian thinking that hybrids were inclined to weakness. The novel succeeds in championing the role of women as proper guardians of biological inheritances; in demonstrating that the “hybrid” Britons—a mixture of Anglo-Saxons and others—are the ideal “breed” for meeting the needs of the upcoming twentieth century; and in revitalizing the otherwise masculine genre of the New Romance.