Notes to Chapter 4: Degeneration

1 John Ruskin, The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century: Two Lectures Delivered at the London Institution..., pp. v, 43. But notice that Ruskin is careful to distinguish between his plague-wind and a common smog where 'the air itself is pure, though you choose to mix dirt with it, and choke yourself with your own nastiness' (p. 60). It is just possible that the stupendous volcanic discharge of Krakatoa in August 1883 may have precipitated the writing of these lectures. The explosions hurled five cubic miles of dust into the atmosphere and intercepted some sunlight worldwide for several years. But, as Ruskin's letters of the 1870s show, this certainly does not preclude a psychogenic explanation.

2 Letter to Charles Eliot Norton, 3 April 1871: The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, Vol. 37, p. 30. Hereafter cited as Works.

3 Letter to Charles Eliot Norton, 15 January 1873: Works, Vol. 37, p. 57.

4 J D Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin's Genius, p. 216.

5 On the use of the garden metaphor by Mill and Hardy, see the chapter 'Hardy's evolutionary meliorism: nature, the garden, and "God's gardener" ' in Roy Morrell's Thomas Hardy: The Will and the Way. Morrell analyses there the scientific accretions which formed around the basic image from Hamlet and Richard II.

6 Oma Stanley, 'T. H. Huxley's treatment of "Nature" ', Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 18 (January 1957), pp. 120-7.

7 T.H. Huxley, 'Evolution and ethics: prolegomena', in his Collected Essays, Vol. 9, p. 10.

8 Edward Dowden, Studies in Literature, 1780-1877, p. 104.

9 The lower figure is from his 'On the age of the sun's heat', Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 5 (March 1862), p. 390; the higher from 'On the sun's heat' (dated 1887), in his Popular Lectures and Addresses, 2nd edn, Vol. 1, p. 397.

10 Quotation and paraphrase from a letter to J.D. Hooker, 9 February: More Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin and A.C. Seward, Vol. 1, pp. 260-1. The editors date the letter 1865.

11 F.W.H. Myers, 'Tennyson as prophet', in his Science and a Future L~fe; with Other Essays, p. 153.

12 Henry Adams, told of the stable Terebratula (lampshells) by LyeIl in 1867-8, suspected that these proved Darwinian evolution had never occurred at all - but he was an exception: The Education of Henry Adams, pp. 226, 228. The best known of the living fossils, Coelacanth, was not discovered until 1938.

13 Herbert Spencer, The PHnciples of Biology, revised and enlarged edn, Vol. 2, p. 506. This passage is unaltered in the first edition of 1864-7.

14 Taken from letters to J.D. Hooker, the first undated, the second of 30 December: Darwin, More Letters, Vol. 1, pp. 76, 114. The editors date these letters to, respectively, 1854 and 1858.

15 H.G. Wells, 'The extinction of man: some speculative suggestions', Pall Mall Gazette, 25 September 1894, p. 3.

16 Andrew Wilson, 'Degeneration', Gentleman's Magazine, vol. 250 (April 1881), p. 491.

17 Henry Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883), though now forgotten, was in its day a bestseller. It sold at least 70,000 copies within five years of publication, and went through thirty editions up to 1890. By the year of Drummond's death (1897) it had sold 120,000 copies and had been translated into four languages. It earned more than twenty rebuttals by scientists and theologians alike, several being book-length treatments: none affected its popularity. Herbert Spencer later incited Eliza Lynn Linton to write a ferocious review of another Drummond book for the Fortnightiv Review. But even she was finally unable to explain away Drummond. 'That he has succeeded in his aim is proved by the enormous success of his book-mere hash of other men's labour as it is-a plagiarism from first to last. It is a thing of this kind which makes one despair of one's generation. The greedy haste to swallow any form of quackery while neglecting truer and better-grounded expositions - the seeming inability to grasp first principles or to go to the fountain-head for knowledge . . . all point to a state of mental confusion': 'Professor Henry Drummond's discovery', Fortnight& Review, n.s., vol. 56 (September 1894), p. 457. In reality, of course, the flow from all the fountains was polluted to some lesser degree. If Drummond's way of arguing had really been sui generis, it would be of no interest today. Being highly symptomatic, however, of a very widespread application of scientific data, it is possible to see that most of the contemporary criticism of Drummond was beside the point. In Pseudo-Philosophy at the End of the Nineteenth Century... by 'Hugh Mortimer Cecil' (i.e. Ernest Newman) the author's taunt was that the jargon is the jargon of pseudo-science, but the ideas are the ideas of the curate at the YMCA (p. 119). Undeniably true; but Linton's and Newman's energies would have been better expended questioning the social function of this type of reasoning and why even the best minds succumbed to it. If biological discourse had atrophied to the point where the ideals of the YMCA were its highest level of aspiration, Drummond could hardly be blamed for capitalising on the fact. Quotations in the text are from the 16th edn, 1885.

18 Michael T. Ghiselin, The Triumph of the Darwinian Method, p. 71.

19 I. F. Clarke, 'The nineteenth-century Utopia', Quarterly Review, vol. 296 (1958), p. 82.

20 I.F. Clarke, The Tale of the Future: From the Beginning to the Present Day. A Checklist · . . between 1644 and 1960, p. 12.

21 Frederick L. Polak, The Image of the Future: Enlightening the Past, Orientating the Present, Forecasting the Future, trans. Elise Boulding, Vol. 1, p. 302.

22 These terms are used, respectively, by Richard Gerber, Utopian Fantasy: A Study of English Utopian fiction since the End of the Nineteenth Century, and Robert DeMaria, 'From BulwerLytton to George Orwell: the Utopian novel in England, 1870-1950', unpublished PhD thesis, Columbia University. DeMaria further distinguishes between physiological and orthodox eutopias, and other dystopias which he lumps together in one class.

23 Frank E. Manuel oversimplifies the biological influence in this fashion in his essay 'Toward a psychological history of Utopias', in his Utopias and Utopian Thought, p. 86.

24 In the preface to By and By: An Historical Romance of the Future, new edn (London, 1875), p. vi, Edward Maitland ventures no examples of such literature. Possibly, but hardly probably, he had in mind Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race (1871), but the tone there is hardly one of despair. More likely he is referring to such gloomy forecasts as W.R. Greg's speculative Enigmas of Life of 1872. The same comment appears in the first edition (1873) of By and By.

25 This phrase is P.N. Furbank's, used in a discussion of Erewhon in his SamuelButler, p. 90.

26 [Ellis James Davis], Pyrna: a Commune,' or, Under the Ice, p. 58.

27 Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie, The Time Traveller: The Life of H.G. Wells, pp. 57-9.

28 H.G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain - since 1866, Vol. 1, p. 204.

29 Quoted by 'Geoffrey West' (Geoffrey Harry Wells; no relation), H.G. WeIls: A Sketch for a Portrait, p. 62. The odd punctuation is as given by G.H. Wells.

30 Or, if not from Huxley's lectures, then definitely from his published essays, which Wells read assiduously. 'We read his speeches, we borrowed the books he wrote, we clubbed ... to buy the Nineteenth Century' (quoted in ibid., p. 49).

31 H.G. Wells, Text-Book of Biology, with an introduction by G.B. Howes, 2 vols (London,1893). There was a revised edition of part I in 1894. This work, despite being Wells's first book, is very little known. It is not mentioned, for instance, in Ingvald Raknem's meticulous bibliography H.G. Wells and His Critics. Indeed, the only published reference to it by Wells himself seems to have been in a chatty letter to Grant Richards of 6 November 1895, where he calls it 'a cram book - and pure hackwork . . . facts imagined' (from the unpublished letter as quoted by Bernard Bergonzi, The Early H.G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances, p. 24). These contemptuous remarks - which are untrue may have been occasioned by Wells not, in his own opinion, having been given sufficient credit for some revision undertaken by himself and a friend. There are some relevant letters in the Wells Archive, University of Illinois. The Text-Book was reissued in 1898, fully revised by A.M. Davies.

32 H.G. Wells, Julian Huxley and G.P. Wells, The Science of Life (London, 1931), pp. 262, 265.

33 H.G. Wells, 'Human evolution, an artificial process', Fortnightly Review, n.s., vol. 60 (October 1896), p. 594.

34 The six surviving much-revised drafts of The Time Machine were written between 1887 and 1895. The two serialised versions, in the National Observer (1894) and the New Review (1895), differ - in the first case radically, and in the second slightly - from the Heinemann first edition of May 1895. West, H.G. Wells, pp. 289-95, supplies the basic facts of its composition, and Bernard Bergonzi in Review of English Studies, vol. 11 (1960), pp. 42-51, a detailed discussion of the various versions. We are only concerned here with the final form. Quotations in the text are from The Time Machine: An Invention (London, 1969) throughout.

35 Norman Nicholson, H.G. Wells, p. 26.

36 Quoted by Vincent Brome, H.G. Wells: A Biography, p. 64.37 A.L. Morton, The English Utopia, p. 187.

38 The Short Stories of H. G. Wells, p. 753. 'A Story' first appeared in the PallMall Gazette in 1897.

39 Bergonzi, Early H.G. Wells, p. 49; though earlier Bergonzi defines the mythic qualities of the novel as operating in such socio-literary terms on one level only. He concedes that 'its further significance is biological and even cosmological' (p. 42). The same limitation may be found in William Bellamy's attempt, in The Novels of Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy: 1800-1910, to find The Time Machine's theme comparable with other 1890s novels: 'the indirect transcription of "abnormal" mental phenomena into literary terms' (p. 70).

40 H.G. Wells, 'Zoological retrogression', Gentleman's Magazine, vol. 271 (September 1891), p. 253. Robert M. Philmus, 'The Time Machine; or, the fourth dimension as prophecy', PMLA, vol. 84 (May 1969), refers to this knowledge of Wells's of degeneration 'at this early date' as certainly eliminating the possibility of the influence of Max Nordau, which 'Bergonzi adduces as a source for the vision of the future' (p. 530). But Bergonzi does no such thing. He carefully notes that ' The Time Machine was already completed' when Degeneration appeared in English in March 1895: see his 'The Time Machine: an ironic myth', Critical Quarterly, vol. 2 (Winter 1960), p. 297. Further, Wells's 'early' knowledge of degeneration dates to a good deal earlier than 1891 - in fact to 1884-5, if Wells's own testimony is to be trusted (see n. 29, above). As shown earlier in this chapter, degeneration was in the air among biologists and other interested parties from 1880 or earlier: long before any of the literary manifestations.

41 Darko Suvin, 'The Time Machine versus Utopia as a structural model for science fiction', Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 10 (December 1973), p. 338.

42 Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart: My Autobiography, pp. 152, 158. Jefferies's few other recorded comments on biological theory show him to have been, like most field naturalists of the period, a rather vague Lamarckian. His diaries display an acute lack of sympathy with Darwinism: see, for instance, the entries for February and March 1887 of The Nature Diaries and Note-Books ed. Samuel J. Looker, pp. 249-50.

43 William Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man (London, 1925), p. 423. First published in 1872.

44 H.G. Wells, 'The Man of the year million: a scientific forecast', Pall Mall Budget, 16 November 1893, p. 1796. The anonymous parody of this article, '1,000,000 AD' in Punch, vol. 105, 25 November 1893, p. 250, consisting of verses and an illustration, testifies to the vividness of Wells's imagination. The poem follows the argument closely, and the drawing shows ovoid heads with attached hands, with one bathing in a crystalline bath of pepsin. The reference to Wells's article is incorrect.

45 Wells's bold assumption that evolution on Mars may have paralleled that on earth may be thought to have been the wildest fantasy considering the radically different and hostile environment on that planet. Right through our period, however, Victorian astronomers with their relatively crude instruments were of the opinion, in the words of the astronomerjournalist Richard Proctor (1837--88), that 'in all essential habitudes the planet Mars resembles our own earth'. See his 'Lands and seas of another World', Fraser's Magazine, vol. 78 (August 1868), p. 256. Imaginary 'seas' had been detected and named; the atmosphere was believed to have similar constituents; the temperature range to be comparable, and so on. These misconceptions lasted for an extraordinarily long time. Wells's own two columns on the same topic twenty-eight years later echo Proctor: 'there is no doubt that Mars is very like the earth... It has lands and oceans, continents and islands, mountain ranges and inland seas.' See his 'intelligence on Mars', Saturday Review, vol. 81 (4 April 1896), p. 345. It was not until 1907 that a race of canal-building Martians, as proposed by Percival Lowell, at last became too much for the biologists, as represented by Alfred Russel Wallace, to swallow. He answered his own question Is Mars Inhabitable? in the negative. So there was nothing intrinsically absurd in Wells offering his readers Martians as Homo sapiens at the far end of evolution.

46 H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, p.4.

47 However, we know that Wells was very assiduous in his preparatory reading: before working on the later d Modern Utopia (1905) he steeped himself in Utopian theories as diverse as More, Campanella, Cabet, Howells, Bellamy, Morris and Hertzka (MacKenzie, (Time Traveller, p. 189).

48 To give just one example, the parasitical model also forms the basis, in Davis' Pyrna, of the relations between the people of the Mune and a subservient race dwellling below them whom they regard 'with the sort of feeling with which we regard animals - as an inferior creation, made to be of service' (p. 67). This race, or species, of domestics seems to exist primarily to deal with the communards' sewage.

49 T.H. Huxley, 'The struggle for existence in human society ', in his Collected Essays, Vol. 9, p.199.

50 The phrase is Mark Hillegas' in The Future as Nightmare: H.G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians, p.18.

51 'The discovery of the future: a discourse delivered at the Royal Institution on Friday, January 24 by Mr H.G. Wells', Nature, vol. 65 (6 February 1902), pp. 326-31. Thirty two years later, Wells spoke of this lecture as marking his 'steady invasion of the world of influential and authoritative people'. His own evaluation of its contents was: 'vague, inexact and rhetorical, but that is the measure of the progress in definition that has been going on in the intervening third of a century. When it was read, that lecture was well abreast of its time.' See Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, Vol. 2, pp. 636, 649. Certainly it drew out in detail certain threads of thought common to all the romances.

52 T.H. Huxley, 'Evolution and ethics', Collected Essays, Vol. 9, p. 86.