Abstract
In the lives and in the fictions of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), Charles Dickens (1812–1870), and Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), it is possible to see the aptness of the claim of the biologist, Ernst Mayr that “the Darwinian revolution affected every thinking man [and woman]”: “A world view developed by anyone after 1859 was by necessity quite different from any world view formed prior to 1859.”1 There are those, of course, who would dispute the notion of such a revolution. But we can see in the stories of Poe and in Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53) their attempts to come to terms imaginatively with various challenges to scriptural literalism and Natural Theology before 1859. Writing after the publication of the Origin of Species, Dickens could explore fully in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) the implications of a universe denied divinity and design. But it was Doyle, born in 1859, who was to come of age in the aftermath of the publication of the Origin and the triumph, for some, of a uniformitarian science that had extended its reach from physics and geology into the realm of living organisms. Beyond would lie the ultimate domain, that of human consciousness.2
We are now in the dreary desert which separates two ages of Belief. A new era is at hand.
Windwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man (1872)
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Notes
Ernst Mayr, “Darwin, Intellectual Revolutionary,” in Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 182. Also, see Robert M. Young’s comments on the triumph of Uniformitarianism in Darwin’s Origin of Species in his Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H. M. S. Beagle, Under the Command of Captain Fitzroy, R.N. from 1832 to 1836 (London: Henry Colburn, 1839), p. 369.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures (Boston: Little, Brown, 1924), p. 26. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four, in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Z vols (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1930), I, 137. All further references to the novel and other Holmes stories or novels appear in the text.
Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man (1872; reprint, Stark, Kans.: De Young Press, 1997), p. 377. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text. Significantly, Reade here echoed Vestiges of the Natural Histoty of Creation.
On the generic status of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, see Milton Millhauser, Just Before Darwin: Robert Chambers and “Vestiges” (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), pp. 58–85; and Secord, Victorian Sensation, pp. 41–76.
Adam Sedgwick, A Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge, 5th edn (London: John W. Parker, 1850), pp. xvi—xvii.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Oxford Illustrated Dickens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 1. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
Here, Reade would seem to echo Hegel: see Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “The Oriental World,” in The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, rev. edn (1899; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1956). Relevant discussions of British racism in the nineteenth century are to be found in Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); and George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987).
Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom, 7th edn, 2 vols in 1 (New York: Brentano’s, 1924), II, 453.
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot [Marian Evans] (1854; reprint, New York: Harper and Row, 1957), p. 14. For a classic discussion of George Eliot and the Higher Criticism, see Basil Willey, “George Eliot: Hennell, Strauss and Feuerbach,” in Nineteenth Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), pp. 204–36. More recent discussions of the Higher Criticism in mid-Victorian England may be found in passing in John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives, Cambridge History of Science, ed. George Basalla (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Adrian Desmond, Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997); and Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (New York: Warner Books, 1991).
Edgar Allan Poe, “Eureka: A Prose Poem,” in EdgarAllan Poe: Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 1357.
John Tyndall, “Scientific Use of the Imagination,” in Fragments of Science: A Series of Detached Essays,Addresses and Reviews, 5th edn (London: Longmans, Green, 1876), p. 455.
William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Times, 3 vols (London: John W. Parker, 1837), III, 481. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
William Paley, Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, 3rd edn (London: R. Faulder, 1803), pp. 1–2. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
Charles Darwin, The Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilized by Insects, 2nd edn, vol. 17 of The Works of Charles Darwin, eds Paul H. Barrett and R. B. Freeman (1877; reprint, New York: New York University Press, 1988), p. 1. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text. I am indebted to Neal C. Gillespie’s Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), for directing me to this text.
See Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, ed. J. W. Burrow (1859; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 139–42.
George Combe, The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects, 6th edn (Edinburgh: John Anderson, Jun., 1836), p. xi. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
Robert Chambers, “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” and Other Evolutionary Writings, ed. James A. Secord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 335–36. For discussions of the tradition in which George Combe, John Elliotson, and Mr. Vestiges participated, see Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); and Fred Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
For various discussions of a naturalistic approach to the study of brain and mind, see Edwin Clarke and L. S. Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud; Anne Harrington, Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); L. S. Hearnshaw, A Short History of British Psychology: 1840–1940 (London: Methuen, 1964); and Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).
Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 12, emphasis added. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
For a discussion of the Expression of the Emotions, see Paul Ekman, introduction to The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 3rd edn, by Charles Darwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. xxi—xxxvi. Throughout the Expression of the Emotions, Darwin refers to Winwood Reade in footnotes.
[Thomas Carlyle], “Characteristics” (review of An Essay on the Origin and Prospects of Man, by Thomas Hope, and Philosophische Vorlesungen, by Friedrich von Schlegel), Edinburgh Review, 54 (1831): 358.
William B. Carpenter, Principles of Human Physiology, with their Chief Applications to Psychology, Pathology, Therapeutics, Hygiene, and Forensic Medicine, 4th edn (Philadelphia: Blanchard and Lea, 1855), p. 589. Darwin’s annotated copy of the fourth edition is in the Darwin Collection of the Cambridge University Library: see vol. 5, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin: 1851–1855, eds Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 340, n. 8.
See Lucille B. Ritvo, Darwin’s Influence on Freud: A Tale of Two Sciences (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Also, see Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970); and Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” in vol. 7 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), pp. 77–78. In Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, Ronald R. Thomas quotes the same passage to suggest an emphasis on the physiological rather than the psychological: see “The Lie Detector and the Thinking Machine,” pp. 21–39. In Freud, Race, and Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), Sander L. Gilman touches upon Freud’s “resistance to the language of biological determinism” (p. 7, emphasis added).
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© 2003 Lawrence Frank
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Frank, L. (2003). Sherlock Holmes and “The Book of Life”. In: Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919328_6
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