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1 results

  • Chapter 3 - Cain’s Legacy

  • from Part II - Deep Time
  • Jay Clayton, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
  • Book:
    Literature, Science, and Public Policy
    Published online:
    03 August 2023
    Print publication:
    17 August 2023, pp 54-75
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  • Summary

    Victorian science fiction, imperial romance, sensation fiction, and utopian fiction helped readers cope with the immensity of the evolutionary time scale by stories that featured the progressive improvement of the species through the inheritance of acquired characteristics or by planned programs of eugenics. Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race, Haggard’s She, Collins’s The Legacy of Cain, and other works of Victorian genre fiction demonstrate some of the consequences of neo-Lamarckian thinking and serve as a warning to commentators on epigenetics who have suggested that it supports Lamarck’s views. In the hands of novelists, neo-Lamarckism buttressed notions of the inherited character of criminality, the progressive nature of evolution, and the tendency to “blame mothers” for degeneration of the species.