Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) was such a significant and formative work that preceding ideas about heredity have often been neglected if not consigned to the dustbin of history which awaits overturned theories. In Dickens and Heredity Goldie Morgentaler not only draws attention to a little-studied aspect of this continuingly popular Victorian novelist, his fascination with heredity and his constant deployment of amazing resemblances between children and parents, but also delineates the contemporary theories of heredity which had an impact on his fiction. As she points out, at a period when the actual mechanics of genetic transmission were unknown, there was but a fine line, if any distinction at all, between knowledge and conjecture, a thin edge between science and popular belief, which meant a rich diversity of ideas upon which Dickens could draw. While showing that the early nineteenth century scientific theories of preformation, blended heredity (later adapted by Darwin as pangenesis), and reproduction, as well as broader traditional cultural concepts, resonated with many of Dickens’s thematic concerns, she also reveals that his final three novels indicate the significant influence of The Origin of Species.

Morgentaler shows the changing use of concepts of heredity as Dickens developed as a novelist. His early novels depicted an absolute determinism, which mutated into a looser model in the middle period, while after 1859, his concerns shifted to the wider issues arising from Darwinian evolutionary theory, into a preoccupation with regeneration, with disintegration, and with death as a biological process. Indeed, she argues that after The Origin of Species, heredity as a factor in the formation of self, a theme associated by Dickens with cohesion and integrity (for him, positive moral qualities were far more hereditable than negative), very nearly vanished in this ‘poetics of disintegration’. Also discussed are the issues of class, race, and ethnic origin as these were involved in the social implications of heredity at that time.

This study is valuable for its thorough analysis of pre-Darwinian theories of heredity and the role of hereditarian thought within mid-Victorian culture, as well for its demonstration of the impact of Darwin on the wider cultural context, besides shedding new light on a complex novelist.

Lesley A. Hall

Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, London