Samuel Butler sharply divides critics, some seeing him as a relativist and thus a precursor of modernism, others as a purveyor of outdated scientific and philosophical dogma. This essay situates him as a transitional figure, straddling modern and Victorian paradigms in the tradition of the novel of ideas. Butler’s relativistic tendencies emerge through distinctive formal techniques, his chief influence on the modern novel: enigmatic use of satire; rapid, dissonant tonal shifts; defamiliarization of commonplace ideas; and fierce iconoclasm – techniques that fuel his radical questioning both of rationality and of ideas themselves. But Butler also affirmed common sense, instinct, and faith – in opposition to rationality – by conceiving them in Lamarckian evolutionary terms: that is, as repositories of intellectual choices made over the course of millennia and preserved in collective unconscious memory. Butler thus believed that ideas always fall short of truth, even as they facilitate an open-ended, interminable progress toward it.

Nineteenth-century studies has – like other fields – sought to move beyond the notion of progressive secularization in which religious beliefs disappear in modernity. But what will replace this paradigm? A compelling alternative emerges when we attend to how the Romantics and Victorians resist what Charles Taylor calls “excarnation” – the modern construal of religion primarily as inward belief unhooked from material reality and ritual forms. The Romantics’ and Victorians’ liturgical fascinations signal a suspicion of excarnation and an attempt to re-poeticize religion. The full significance of this use of liturgy, however, only appears in light of a much deeper genealogy of modernity stretching back to the late-medieval rise of voluntarism and nominalism. Such a genealogy reveals the theological origins of so many modern bifurcations (natural/supernatural, reason/faith, etc.) – bifurcations that nineteenth-century texts challenge and rethink by way of liturgy. Examples from Keats, Hopkins, Carlyle, Arnold, Dickens, and others forecast the book’s main arguments.

A period of significant demographic, social, and political transformation produced essays marked by a deep seriousness of tone and a sense of weighty purpose that departed sharply from the playful quality of the periodical tradition and the lighter touch of the Romantic familiar essay. Essayists in criticism of this period (Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, William Morris, Oscar Wilde) were deeply engaged in defining ideas of culture that could encompass an increasingly diverse and fragmented society. This chapter reflects on the publication contexts that shaped some of the best-known examples of the Victorian critical essay; examines Victorian critics’ emphasis on specific capacities in perception as a ground for pedagogical exposition with the aim of achieving social coherency; and highlights the deep historicism and awareness of mediation that informs the Victorian essayist’s approach to cultural criticism.

Kaliprasanna Sinha’s Hutom Pyanchar Naksha (Observations of Hutom the Owl[GK14]; 1862) provides a bird’s eye view, so to speak, of nineteenth-century Calcutta, the bustling metropolis that also served as the seat of the British government in India. In reading the vignettes of urban life that the text proffers, this essay makes note of Sinha’s even-handed satire of the foibles of natives and the British alike. But given that it is the nouveau riche Bengali gentry that becomes the target for Sinha’s most trenchant critique, the essay considers how Hutom[GK15], written in the aftermath of 1857, an event that Sinha often refers to, presents, nonetheless, a more lateral view that redirects, if not displaces, received notions of colonial resistance. Hutom [GK16]affects, instead, a charged insouciance that revels in its immediate socius that it also critique. It does so, though, by deploying the form of the literary sketch and a narrative mode that is antinarrative or, more specifically – nonevental – in ways that are transimperially imbricated with nineteenth-century literary history, English as well as Bengali.

John Gould’s father was a gardener. A very, very good one – good enough to be head of the Royal Gardens at Windsor. John apprenticed, too, becoming a gardener in his own right at Ripley Castle, Yorkshire, in 1825. As good as he was at flowers and trees, birds became young John Gould’s true passion early in life. Like John Edmonstone, John Gould (1804–1881) adopted Charles Waterton’s preservation techniques that kept taxidermied bird feathers crisp and vibrant for decades (some still exist in museums today), and he began to employ the technique to make extra cash. He sold preserved birds and their eggs to fancy Eton schoolboys near his father’s work. His collecting side-hustle soon landed him a professional post: curator and preserver of the new Zoological Society of London. They paid him £100 a year, a respectable sum for an uneducated son of a gardener, though not enough to make him Charles Darwin’s social equal (Darwin initially received a £400 annual allowance from his father plus £10,000 as a wedding present).

Darwin claimed that On the Origin of Species, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was only an “abstract” of that much longer book he had begun to write in 1856, after his irreverent meeting with J. D. Hooker, T. H. Huxley, and T. V. Wollaston, and Lyell’s exasperated encouragement in May. But he never completed that larger book. Instead, he worked on plants and pigeons and collected information through surveys from other naturalists and professional specimen hunters like Alfred Russel Wallace for the better part of a decade.

For all their scientific prowess and public renown, there is no comparable Lyell-ism, Faraday-ism, Einstein-ism, Curie-ism, Hawking-ism, or deGrasse-Tyson-ism. So, there must be something even more powerful than scientific ideas alone caught in the net of this ism attached to Darwin. And whatever the term meant, it’s fair to say that Darwinism frightened Bryan.

Historian Everett Mendelsohn was intrigued. In the middle of writing a review of an annual survey of academic publications in the History of Science, he marveled that an article in that volume contained almost 40 pages’ worth of references to works on Darwin published in just the years between 1959 and 1963. Almost 200 works published in a handful of years – no single figure in the history of science commanded such an impressive academic following. Yet Mendelsohn noted that, paradoxically, no one had written a proper biography of Darwin by 1965. Oh sure, there was commentary. Lots of commentary. But so many of the authors were retired biologists who had a tendency toward hagiography or, the opposite, with axes to grind.

Meeting the “White Raja of Sarawak” in Singapore in 1853 had been a stroke of luck. Honestly, it could have been a major turning point in what had been an unlucky career so far for 30-year-old collector Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) (Figure 4.1). But the steep, rocky, sweaty climb up Borneo’s Mt. Serembu (also known as Bung Moan or Bukit Peninjau) in the last week of December 1855 wasn’t exactly what Wallace expected. His eyeglasses fogged in the humidity. Bamboo taller than buildings crowded the narrow path. Near the top, the rainforest finally parted. But it revealed neither a temple nor some sort of massive colonial complex with all the trappings of empire worthy of a “raja.” Instead, there leaned a modest, very un-colonial-ruler-like white cabin. When he saw it, Wallace literally called it “rude.”

Charles Darwin spent nearly the whole of his writing career attempting to convince his colleagues, the general public, and, by extension, you and me, that change occurs gradually. Tiny slivers of difference accumulate over time like grains of sand in a vast hourglass. Change happens, in other words. It’s painfully slow, but it’s inevitable. By implication, two organisms that look different enough to us to be classified as separate species share, many tens of thousands or even millions of generations back, the same ancestors. (Inbreeding means we don’t even need to go back quite that many generations to demonstrate overlap, but you get the point.) But change that gradual means, as Darwin himself well recognized, that looking for “missing links” would be a pretty silly errand. Differences between one generation and the next look to our eyes just like common variation. It’s one grain falling from the top of the hourglass to the bottom. You can’t perceive the change. You would have to go back in time to find the very first individuals who possessed a particular trait – bat-like wings, say, or human-ish hands – and then, turning to their parents, you would see something almost identical.

Transmutation. “Evolutio,” if you wanted to be fancy and Italian about it. Whatever you want to call it, the grand unrolling of one type into another, connecting all living things into a single tree of life was all the rage among the society gentlemen. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, an influential Scottish judge in the 1700s, had said shocking things about it. Monboddo’s metaphysics separated humans from brutes by only the thinnest slice of cognition. And imagine how he scandalized the chattering classes when, according to rumor anyway, he suggested perhaps tails even lingered, dangling from the spinal cords of the underdeveloped. They called him an “eccentric,” a fusty, argumentative judge and a voracious reader. Perhaps too learned – genius and madness, you know.

The Good News finally snagged him. In late September 1881, he was near the end, bedridden, languishing in a soft purple robe, still able to read, though he always preferred to be read to. Lady Hope entered the drawing room at the top of the stairs quietly, respectfully, as the golden hour gently illuminated corn fields and English oak forests through his picturesque bay window. The faintest crown of white hair encircled his head in the late afternoon light; the rest was wizardly beard (Figure 6.1). Lady Hope, the well-known evangelist, was visiting the Darwins, and she approached the old scientist cautiously. But she needn’t have. In his wrinkled hands he held the Bible, open to the New Testament Epistle of Hebrews. “The Royal Book,” Darwin called it, serenely, mentioning a few favored passages.

The stone is still there in the garden. That’s what gets me. It’s not the house itself – houses decay slowly and can be preserved pretty easily, especially in Britain where even an eighteenth-century country house is not “old.” It’s not even the tree behind the house, alive when Charles Darwin still lived in his Down House, now propped up by guywires against inevitable collapse as a kind of totem of the great naturalist’s existence. If you leave the rear exit, the one that takes you to Darwin’s preserved greenhouse and the stunning flora on a pretty path lined in that particular English way of making the perfectly manicured seem somehow “natural,” you might glance to the left and see behind a small iron fence a one-foot-wide stone. A round mill stone or pottery wheel, it was, or appears to have been.

This chapter focuses on the pairing of popular fiction and imperialism. It takes as a starting point the historical coincidence of the rise of new forms of popular fiction with the intensification of colonialism in Britain during the New Imperialism (roughly from the 1870s to 1914). Examining titles including H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) and numerous others, the discussion treats Victorian popular fiction as both a site where colonialist ideology exerts its power and a site where ambivalences, vagaries and paradoxes speak of a struggle to make sense of imperial rationales. Examining how popular fiction represents history and the individual, landscape and temporality, threat and assimilation and the supposed adaptability of Englishness reveals some of the rhetorical and ideological contortions that rendered British imperialism thinkable to its own prosecutors.

Chapter 4 reads Charles Dickenss Barnaby Rudge (1841) and David Copperfield (1849–50) as sustained meditations on the visual figure of the public man and the communal work of celebrity culture. These novels confirm the reverberations through British fiction of the temporality of fashion and its logics of currency and spectacle. The chapter analyzes Barnaby Rudge, a novel openly in conversation with the Newgate school, in terms of Dickens’s efforts to negate the criminal protagonist’s purchase on demotic celebrity, and to claim for respectable characters the possibilities for celebrity and publicness that the earlier crime novels had made imaginable. The chapter then offers a fresh take on David Copperfield that moves beyond biographical and psychoanalytic readings of the novel. I argue that Dickens shows in David Copperfield that by mid-century, an awareness of one’s own visibility has become an integral component of identity formation and a prerequisite to participation in social life.

Within a span of less than five years, Mexican presses published two historical novels based on the Dongo massacre and its rapid resolution by the viceregal judiciary. The first of these was José de Cuéllar’s 1869 El Pecado del Siglo: Novela Histórica, Época de Revillagigedo, published by the Tipográfica del Colegio Polimático in San Luis Potosí. Only four years later, the first volume of a book called Los Asesinos de Dongo: Novela Histórica appeared in Mexico City, written by Manuel Filomeno Rodríguez. In 1876, the same publisher, Barbedillo and Company, published volume two of Los Asesinos de Dongo. Both authors chose to write these historical novels to take part in an important nationalist and didactic literary trend in Mexico’s Restored Republic. Influenced by the politician, intellectual, journalist and writer Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, novelists like Rodríguez and Cuéllar felt inspired to help Mexicans understand their own history through fictional characters.