Human Evolution and Fantastic Victorian Fiction by Anna Neill (review)

Anna Neill’s Human Evolution and Victorian Fantastic Fiction explores how selected nonrealist Victorian narratives challenge the dominant assumptions about human nature and its limits that circulated in the context of theories of human evolution. At the center of the argument is what Neill calls the deep time of evolutionary theory, the long periods required for gradual changes due to natural selection to accumulate into species difference. For many Victorian thinkers, Neill explains, the assumption that human evolution involved such a process implied that short-term political and cultural change could not overcome or counteract the biological imperatives determined by the workings of deep time. The gradualist assumption therefore allied itself to neo-Malthusian arguments about the inevitability of competition for resources, as well as to eugenicist projects and more generally to the racist science fostered by the developmental paradigm ruling anthropology. Neill makes the polemical thrust of her argument quite clear in the opening pages of the monograph. By focusing on “strange narratives from the 1860s onward where disruptions of deep, gradual time redefine human nature and human agency,” she proposes to show how these narratives “challenge an often pernicious evolutionary conception of the human,” unsettling “human exceptionalism and ideas about gradual and progressive human social development that justified colonial violence” (3).

Neill makes her case through readings of an interesting variety of texts, including books for children (Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies [1863], Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland [1865] and Through the Looking Glass [1871], and Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories [1902]), the proto-science fiction of Herbert George Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), the generically diverse polemical and fictional work of Samuel Butler and Edwin Abbott, and a set of utopias (Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 [1888], William Morris’s News from Nowhere, or, An Epoch of Rest [1890], and Wells’s A Modern Utopia [1905]). Although all of the readings focus on the texts’ handling of human evolution and temporality, they are not at all repetitive, each zeroing in on a different way of challenging dominant conceptions of humanity, race, and social possibility extrapolated from the model of deep time and its affiliation with the developmental paradigm of anthropology. The readings are often subtle, sometimes setting aside plot and character for less obvious features of form. These are not the type of readings that attempt to clarify difficulties within the texts but rather the reverse, readings that accentuate the texts’ complexities and militate against seeing them as entirely self-consistent. Neill tends to assume that the dominant features of the texts have been established by prior readings and concentrates entirely on identifying ways in which the texts undermine them. It is entirely to Neill’s credit that her readings emphasize the ideological tensions and contradictions within these texts without attempting to resolve them. For Neill these texts are both embedded in Victorian ethnocentrism and anthropocentrism and more or less deliberately at odds with them, so that they both advance and subtly contest or even subvert “pernicious evolutionary conceptions of the human” (3).

Neill’s treatment of the children’s books is particularly interesting and instructive. The reading of Water-Babies focuses on the contradictions at work in Kingsley’s depictions of race and class. Neill argues that the discrepancy in the story between protesting the effects of industrial capitalism and viewing racial others as less than human “rests centrally on the novel’s conflicted relationship to evolutionary anthropology,” Kingsley’s inability to reconcile long-term biological adaptiveness with the more immediate “shaping power of external circumstances” (23, 25). The result is “a failed narrative, unable to unite a racialized model of descent with its story of moral transformation and growth” (14). But this failure is ultimately more to Kingsley’s credit than otherwise: “It is almost as though the novel in all its peculiar, self-effacing form has written itself against the racial chauvinism it...