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Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction
Darwin’s theory thrust human life into time and nature and subjected it to naturalistic rather than spiritual or moral analysis. Insisting on gradual and regular–lawful–change, Darwinian thought nevertheless requires acknowledgment of chance and randomness for a full explanation of biological phenomena. George Levine shows how these conceptions affected nineteenth–century novelists―from Dickens and Trollope to Conrad―and draws illuminating contrasts with the pre–Darwinian novel and the perspective of natural theology.
Levine demonstrates how even writers ostensibly uninterested in science absorbed and influenced its vision. A central chapter treats the almost aggressively unscientific Trollope as the most Darwinian of the novelists, who worked out a gradualist realism that is representative of the mainstream of Victorian fiction and strikingly consonant with key Darwinian ideas. Levine’s boldly conceived analysis of such authors as Scott and Dickens demonstrates the pervasiveness and power of this revolution in thought and sheds new light on Victorian realism.
Levine demonstrates how even writers ostensibly uninterested in science absorbed and influenced its vision. A central chapter treats the almost aggressively unscientific Trollope as the most Darwinian of the novelists, who worked out a gradualist realism that is representative of the mainstream of Victorian fiction and strikingly consonant with key Darwinian ideas. Levine’s boldly conceived analysis of such authors as Scott and Dickens demonstrates the pervasiveness and power of this revolution in thought and sheds new light on Victorian realism.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1988
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April 27, 2022
Read this for class and enjoyed it more than I thought I would, considering I haven’t read any of the novels discussed here. It traces out major figures of English literature mapping out the transition from natural theology to Darwinian evolution, focusing on issues of change and history, blurring of boundaries, genealogical and ecological connections, abundance, denial of design and teleology, mystery and order, and chance.
Levine begins by showing the metaphysical presumptions of natural theology present in the work of Jane Austen, where “chance events turn out to be the consequence of moral choice” and the world exists in such a way that it is possible to translate it into language — i.e. objectivity is not a lost cause. With Darwin came the collapse of teleology, and Dickens represents for Levine a transitional figure whose work embodied Darwin’s emphasis on multiplicity and variation. Both individuals and the world are always changing. Trollope for Levine represented a Victorian writer purely in the domain of Darwinian presumptions and the literary tradition of realism — reflecting a world morally irrational, but still explicable in history. Explanations no longer lean on any notion of design. The world was impermanent, things highly interdependent and interrelated, but very persistently imperfect. Conrad the most extreme tendency of this logic wrote his character Marlow as an imperialist trying to uncover the mysteries of the ‘darkness’ with scientific desire to know the other but the observation turns out to be nothing but a gaze into his own self. And so Conrad, for Levine, embodies a loss of faith in the ability to actually observe nature with any sort of reliability.
The last chapter had a very fascinating examination of Engels and I will just include an excerpt here to finish:
“One of the great ironies of nineteenth-century thought, although a perfectly comprehensible one, is Marx’s interest in Darwin’s work, his belief that Darwin’s theory provided naturalist ground for his own social theories. Robert Young remarks that Marx’s use of Darwin for his own purposes “marked the beginning of a complex and fraught history, wherein not only Marxists but also the proponents of practically every conceivable political position sought to ground it in Darwinism.”” That ideology can interpret and use science is particularly clear in Darwin’s relation to Marxist thought. The connections with Malthusian economics have long led to associations between Darwinian and capitalist theory. Yet not only did Marx view the Orygin as powerful support for his own ideas; Engel saw evolutionism as central to the dialectics of nature. Engels attempted, with remarkable hubris and even more remarkable knowledge and intelligence, to construct a scientific view of nature that would see it as dialectical in structure. Here is how he reads Darwin: “Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially on his countrymen, when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom. Only conscious organisation of social production, in which production and distribution are carried on in a planned way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world as regards the social aspects, in the same way that production in general has done this for men in their aspect as species.” Taking the same “fact,” Darwin’s relation to political economy, Engels is arguing precisely against the reductionist naturalistic fallacy that has dominated most modern social thought in relation to science and Darwinism. (In trying, however, to show that nature itself is dialectical, Engels is, of course, creating another version of that fallacy.)”
“Engels’s ideological project is a different one, but for him, too, the goal is to lift beyond the animal source, and he argues precisely the reverse of the political economists’ view that Darwinism endorses capitalism. The fact that humans are animals does not mean that they should take animal behavior as their own norm. It is a satire on capitalism that it uses animal behavior as such a norm. The separation of value from fact—which at some point must entail direct recognition of the arbitrarily willed social project—is critical to the whole Darwinian debate.”
Levine begins by showing the metaphysical presumptions of natural theology present in the work of Jane Austen, where “chance events turn out to be the consequence of moral choice” and the world exists in such a way that it is possible to translate it into language — i.e. objectivity is not a lost cause. With Darwin came the collapse of teleology, and Dickens represents for Levine a transitional figure whose work embodied Darwin’s emphasis on multiplicity and variation. Both individuals and the world are always changing. Trollope for Levine represented a Victorian writer purely in the domain of Darwinian presumptions and the literary tradition of realism — reflecting a world morally irrational, but still explicable in history. Explanations no longer lean on any notion of design. The world was impermanent, things highly interdependent and interrelated, but very persistently imperfect. Conrad the most extreme tendency of this logic wrote his character Marlow as an imperialist trying to uncover the mysteries of the ‘darkness’ with scientific desire to know the other but the observation turns out to be nothing but a gaze into his own self. And so Conrad, for Levine, embodies a loss of faith in the ability to actually observe nature with any sort of reliability.
The last chapter had a very fascinating examination of Engels and I will just include an excerpt here to finish:
“One of the great ironies of nineteenth-century thought, although a perfectly comprehensible one, is Marx’s interest in Darwin’s work, his belief that Darwin’s theory provided naturalist ground for his own social theories. Robert Young remarks that Marx’s use of Darwin for his own purposes “marked the beginning of a complex and fraught history, wherein not only Marxists but also the proponents of practically every conceivable political position sought to ground it in Darwinism.”” That ideology can interpret and use science is particularly clear in Darwin’s relation to Marxist thought. The connections with Malthusian economics have long led to associations between Darwinian and capitalist theory. Yet not only did Marx view the Orygin as powerful support for his own ideas; Engel saw evolutionism as central to the dialectics of nature. Engels attempted, with remarkable hubris and even more remarkable knowledge and intelligence, to construct a scientific view of nature that would see it as dialectical in structure. Here is how he reads Darwin: “Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially on his countrymen, when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom. Only conscious organisation of social production, in which production and distribution are carried on in a planned way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world as regards the social aspects, in the same way that production in general has done this for men in their aspect as species.” Taking the same “fact,” Darwin’s relation to political economy, Engels is arguing precisely against the reductionist naturalistic fallacy that has dominated most modern social thought in relation to science and Darwinism. (In trying, however, to show that nature itself is dialectical, Engels is, of course, creating another version of that fallacy.)”
“Engels’s ideological project is a different one, but for him, too, the goal is to lift beyond the animal source, and he argues precisely the reverse of the political economists’ view that Darwinism endorses capitalism. The fact that humans are animals does not mean that they should take animal behavior as their own norm. It is a satire on capitalism that it uses animal behavior as such a norm. The separation of value from fact—which at some point must entail direct recognition of the arbitrarily willed social project—is critical to the whole Darwinian debate.”
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