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Of Mice and Men: Evolution and the Socialist Utopia. William Morris, H.G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw

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Abstract

During the British socialist revival of the 1880s competing theories of evolution were central to disagreements about strategy for social change. In News from Nowhere (1891), William Morris had portrayed socialism as the result of Lamarckian processes, and imagined a non-Malthusian future. H.G. Wells, an enthusiastic admirer of Morris in the early days of the movement, became disillusioned as a result of the Malthusianism he learnt from Huxley and his subsequent rejection of Lamarckism in light of Weismann’s experiments on mice. This brought him into conflict with his fellow Fabian, George Bernard Shaw, who rejected neo-Darwinism in favour of a Lamarckian conception of change he called “creative evolution.”

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  1. Department of the History of Science, University of Oklahoma, 601 Elm Avenue, PHSC, Rm. 610, Norman, OK, 73019-3106, USA

    Piers J. Hale

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Earlier drafts of this paper have been presented at the colloquium of the Program in the History of Science and Technology at the University of Minnesota, at the History Department colloquium and the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Group colloquium at the University of British Columbia, and I am grateful to John Beatty, Richard Bellon, Bernard Lightman, Erin McLaughlin-Jenkins, and anonymous reviewers for constructive criticism. I am also much obliged to Paolo Palladino who first provoked me to pursue the possibilities of utopia in terms of the history of biology, and to John Stewart for an insightful semester-long discussion of Malthus’ own political and religious commitments.

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Hale, P.J. Of Mice and Men: Evolution and the Socialist Utopia. William Morris, H.G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw. J Hist Biol 43, 17–66 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-009-9177-0

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