Abstract
In complete opposition to the chivalry and sprezzatura considered desirable in the aristocrats of Ruritanian Medievalism, the Medieval Revival also produced literature which contemplated a darker and perhaps more realistic form of medieval aristocracy—that which I have called the Evolutionary Feudal. Despite forming a clear cohort and having what I find to be more tightly defined characteristics than something like sensation fiction, at the end of the nineteenth-century Evolutionary Feudal texts were not grouped together into a defined, named genre. Instead, they span several literary and marketing categories, such as ‘scientific romances’, historical fiction, disaster fiction, horror, adventure, or even nature and travel writing. Often taking place in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic setting, the Evolutionary Feudal opposes the Chivalric Feudal of Ruritania, in that the Evolutionary draws heavily on natural history and Darwinian theory to depict aristocratic bodies, both of which Ruritania utterly ignores, challenges, or skews. The Evolutionary Feudal’s views on aristocracy are as practical as Ruritania’s views are fanciful. Though both genres are products of the Victorian Medieval Revival, they approach Medievalism from radically different angles. Where Ruritanian fiction hearkens back to the late medieval and early modern periods, calling on the high-romance traditions from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, the Evolutionary Feudal delves deeper into Western history. Despite often being set in the future, the class structures and aristocratic portrayals in these texts refer, instead, to a dark age or even prehistoric setting, where ‘aristocracy’ is often depicted as a tribal chieftainship or the alpha-dominance of the animal world.
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Notes
- 1.
For an overview of Victorian approaches to Darwinism, history, and the natural world, see Virginia Zimmerman’s Excavating Victorians (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008); John Batchelor’s H.G. Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892), 7th ed., translated from the 2nd ed. of the German work (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1895); Bernard Bergonzi’s The Early H.G. Wells (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961); Steven McLean’s The Early Fiction of H.G. Wells (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Frank McConnell’s The Science Fiction of H.G. Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Justin Busch’s Utopian Vision; Michael Draper’s H.G. Wells (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987); Desmond Morris’s The Human Zoo (London: Jonathan Cape LTD, 1969); Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots; Michael Ruses’s Mystery of Mysteries; and Joan DeJean’s Ancients Against Moderns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
- 2.
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871) (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1994), p. 123.
- 3.
See T.H. Huxley, “On the Method of Zadig” (1880) (Collected Essays V. 4: Science and Hebrew Tradition. Cambridge: CUP, 2011).
- 4.
Evelyn Nesbit, Prodigal Days (1934), cited in Paula Uruburu’s American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, the Birth of the “It” Girl, and the Crime of the Century (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008), p. 1.
- 5.
Zimmerman, p. 3.
- 6.
Beer, p. 19.
- 7.
McConnell, p. 59.
- 8.
Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841) 2 vols (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1926), I, p. 15.
- 9.
Q.S. Lilly, ‘Primogeniture’, The Nineteenth-Century: A Monthly Review 40.237 (Nov. 1896), pp. 765–68 (p. 768).
- 10.
A.J.M. [Arthur J. Munby], ‘Primogeniture’, Fraser’s Magazine 2.12 (December 1870), pp. 783–92 (p. 783).
- 11.
For a few comprehensive overviews of Jefferies’ work, see John Fowles’s ‘Introduction’ to After London by Richard Jefferies (1885) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. vii-xxi; W.J. Keith’s Richard Jefferies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), and Julian Wolfreys and William Baker’s Literary Theories (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996).
- 12.
Keith, p. 15.
- 13.
David Blomfield, ‘A Biography of Jefferies and a Note on the Manuscript’, in Literary Theories, ed. by Julian Wolfreys and William Baker (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 30–38 (p. 35); Fowles, p. ix.
- 14.
Keith, p. 31.
- 15.
Richard Jefferies, After London, or Wild England (London: Cassell & Company, Limited, 1885, repr. 1886), pp. 28–29.
- 16.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859), ed. Jim Endersby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 71.
- 17.
Linda H. Peterson, ‘Writing Nature at the Fin de Siècle: Grant Allen, Alice Maynell, and the Split Legacy of Gilbert White’, Victorian Review, 36:2 (Fall 2010), pp. 80–91 (pp. 82–83).
- 18.
Blomfield, p. 35; Peterson, p. 82.
- 19.
Jefferies, After London, p. 60.
- 20.
‘It is worth noting that Jefferies himself was continually emphasizing his own [political] impartiality. He may have been deceived in this belief, but it is clear enough that he did not look upon himself as a conscious propagandist’ (Keith, p. 31).
- 21.
Keith, p. 118.
- 22.
Carlyle, Heroes, II, p. 15.
- 23.
John Brannigan, ‘A New Historicist Reading of “Snowed Up”’, in Literary Theories, ed. by Julian Wolfreys and William Baker (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 157–76 (p. 167).
- 24.
Daniel P. Shea correlates Jefferies’ leisurely plots as a manifestation of Jefferies’ desire to slow down time and to keep his fictional England from progressing (‘Richard Jefferies (1848–87)’, Victorian Review 37:1 (Spring 20110), pp. 33–36, (pp. 34–35)). Though a discussion on Jefferies’ views of technology is too large for the scope of this chapter, there is no question that Jefferies detested utilitarianism and the race for new technology (Blomfield 35; Fowles, p. vii; Jessica Maynard, ‘Agriculture and Anarchy: A Marxist Reading of “Snowed Up”’, in Literary Theories, ed. by Julian Wolfreys and William Baker [Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996], pp. 129–56, p. 133). However, my analysis of After London shows that he held no such views about the progression of the natural world, of which man is a part.
- 25.
Zimmerman, p. 15.
- 26.
Jefferies, After London, p. 286.
- 27.
Ibid., p. 125.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 87.
- 29.
Ibid., pp. 100–02.
- 30.
Ibid., p. 57.
- 31.
Anonymous, ‘The Right of Primogeniture – Mr. Ewart’s motion’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 8:4 (March 1837), pp. 159–62 (p. 162).
- 32.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1871), p. 163.
- 33.
Jefferies, After London, p. 126.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 60.
- 35.
Darwin, Origin, p. 82.
- 36.
Jefferies, After London, p. 210.
- 37.
Jefferies, After London, p. 206.
- 38.
Ibid., p. 120.
- 39.
Ibid., p. 91.
- 40.
Darwin, Descent, p. 61.
- 41.
Beer, p. 7.
- 42.
McLean, p. 1; Adrian J. Desmond, ‘Thomas Henry Huxley’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Online Academic Edition (2014) http://www.britannica.com/EDchecked/topic/277746/Thomas-Henry-Huxley [Accessed 21 January 2014]; Patrick Parrinder, ‘Wells, Herbert George (1866–1946)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), Online ed., ed. by Lawrence Goldman (January 2011). https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/36831.
- 43.
McConnell writes, ‘Without Darwin there may literally not have been an “H.G. Wells” […] evolutionary theory profoundly informed almost every aspect of his [Wells’s] thought’ (p. 53).
- 44.
Batchelor, p. 1.
- 45.
McConnell, pp. 18–19.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 3.
- 47.
Bergonzi, p. 50.
- 48.
Batchelor, pp. 12–13; Anne-Julia Zwierlein, ‘The Biology of Social Class’, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 10:2 (June 2012), pp. 335–60 (p. 352); McLean, p. 27; Matthew Beaumont, ‘Red Sphinx: Mechanics of the Uncanny in The Time Machine’, Science Fiction Studies, 33:2 (July 2006), pp. 230–50 (p. 236).
- 49.
Batchelor, p. 8.
- 50.
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895) ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 48.
- 51.
Bergonzi, p. 48.
- 52.
Martin Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters, & Machines (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2006), p. 206.
- 53.
Wells, Time Machine, pp. 22–23.
- 54.
Ibid., pp. 29–30.
- 55.
James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) p. 98.
- 56.
Wells, Time Machine, pp. 57–58.
- 57.
Ibid., p. 62.
- 58.
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (1939), trans. Edmund Jephcott (1978), ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom, and Stephen Mennell (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994, repr. 2000), p. 100.
- 59.
Wells, Time Machine, p. 62.
- 60.
Ibid., p. 28.
- 61.
Ibid., p. 30.
- 62.
Ibid., p. 41.
- 63.
Darwin, Origin, pp. 70–71; p. 76.
- 64.
John Sutherland asserts that ‘Shield drew heavily’ on After London. John Sutherland, ‘Introduction’ to The Purple Cloud by M. P. Shiel (1901) (London: Penguin, 2012), pp. xiii–xxxiii (p. xxvi).
- 65.
Monique R. Morgan states that it ‘should come as no surprise that in this period of generic emergence and experimentation, Shiel produced a hybrid text that does not fit neatly into one specific category’. Monique R. Morgan, ‘Madness, Unreliable Narration, and Genre in The Purple Cloud’, Science Fiction Studies 36:2 (July 2009), pp. 266–83 (p. 266).
- 66.
Sutherland, ‘Introduction’, p. xx.
- 67.
Patrick Parrinder, ‘From Mary Shelley to The War of the Worlds: The Thames Valley Catastrophe’, Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and its Precursors, ed. by David Seed (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995) pp. 58–74 (p. 64).
- 68.
M.P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud (1901), ed. John Sutherland (London: Penguin, 2012) p. 170; p. 147; p. 152.
- 69.
For analysis of Shiel’s interaction with and portrayals of race, see Sutherland’s ‘Introduction’ to The Purple Cloud; William L. Svitavsky’s ‘From Decadence to Racial Antagonism: M.P. Shiel at the Turn of the Century’, Science Fiction Studies 31:1 (Mar., 2004), pp. 1–24; Morgan’s ‘Madness, Unreliable Narration, and Genre in the Purple Cloud’; Brian W. Aldiss and David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (London: Victor Gollancz: 1986), pp. 145–146.
- 70.
Ibid., p. 170.
- 71.
Shiel, The Purple Cloud, p. 226.
- 72.
Sutherland, ‘Introduction’, p. xxiv.
- 73.
Shiel, The Purple Cloud, p. 16.
- 74.
Ibid., p. 16; p. 20.
- 75.
For a detailed reading on The Purple Cloud’s portrayal of substance abuse in relation to the Evolutionary Feudal, see my article ‘“Dabbling in Delicate Drugs”: Aristocracy, Darwinism and Substance Abuse in M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud’, Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature 142 (2022), pp. 63–84.
- 76.
Shiel, The Purple Cloud p. 21; p. 22.
- 77.
Ibid., p. 19.
- 78.
Ibid., p. 129; p. 20; p. 16.
- 79.
Boucher, ‘Dabbling in Delicate Drugs’, p. 77.
- 80.
Shiel, The Purple Cloud, p. 12.
- 81.
Darwin, Descent, p. 163.
- 82.
Shiel, The Purple Cloud, p. 207.
- 83.
Ibid., p. 33.
- 84.
Ibid., p. 35; p. 34.
- 85.
H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy (London: The Theosophical Publishing Company, 1888), II, p. 400.
- 86.
Sutherland, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxiv–xxv.
- 87.
Shiel, The Purple Cloud, pp. 258–60.
- 88.
Darwin, Descent, p. 160.
- 89.
Shiel, p. 217.
- 90.
Ibid., pp. 187–89.
- 91.
Ibid., p. 212.
- 92.
Ibid., p. 187.
- 93.
Ibid., p. 204; p. 238.
- 94.
Ibid., p. 126.
- 95.
Ibid., pp. 206–07.
- 96.
Svitavsky, ‘From Decadence to Racial Antagonism’, p. 15.
- 97.
Shiel, The Purple Cloud, p. 125; p. 239.
- 98.
Ibid., p. 246.
- 99.
Prys Morgan, ‘From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period’, The Invention of Tradition (1983), eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, rep. 2020), pp. 43–100 (p. 43).
- 100.
Darwin, Origin, p. 92.
- 101.
Nordau, p. 1.
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Boucher, A. (2023). ‘Nature Works On’: Class Hierarchies in the Evolutionary Feudal. In: Science, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41141-0_6
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