The Language of Degeneration: Eugenic Ideas in The Time Machine by H. G. Wells and Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw

By Jenny Jopson

Introduction

Wells and Shaw represent two of the foremost intellectuals of their day who were motivated to embrace the doctrine of eugenics by a hope that it could effect social change. They became prominent members of the British eugenics movement, attending meetings, giving lectures and speeches and maintaining friendships and correspondences with other figures within the movement. They also conveyed their eugenic ideas through the medium of their literary works, and in doing so, provided the eugenicists with metaphors with which to articulate their theories.

The period of the eugenics movement² produced many novels and plays suffused with the fear of the deterioration of the race and the language of regeneration.³ Of these, The Time Machine and Man and Superman provide the main focus for this study, representing examples of the best-known and most influential of the works of their respective authors. Through an analysis of the eugenic ideas contained in the texts I will demonstrate how they are realised through a creative medium by men who wished to impart a social message to their audience, and, supported by an exploration of the eugenic views expressed by their authors elsewhere, I will present a view of the eugenics movement through the lens of literary fiction.

Despite the prevalence of notions of class hierarchy in eugenic doctrine, most eugenicists acknowledged that the project of regeneration would need to involve all sections of society.¹⁶ Pearson asserted the need to transcend class boundaries in order to attain a functional society and a worthy ruling class: ‘There is a hereditary nobility, an aristocracy of worth, and it is not confined to any social class; it is a caste which is scattered throughout all the classes.’¹⁷

However, in addition to these factors, which all find abundant expression in the historiographical literature, there are other influential elements which have been largely neglected and which are elucidated by a study of the textual content of The Time Machine and Man and Superman, how the works were received, and an exploration of the eugenic ideas of their authors. The Time Machine emphasizes the influence of notions of class and race on the British eugenics movement (while its various interpretations highlight the debate among historians of eugenics over the extent to which race as a category was influential), while Man and Superman asserts the doctrines of the Life Force and the Superman, which reflect the influence of the philosophical thought of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche on the eugenics movement, and on contemporary thought in general.

This conviction was instilled in him from an early age, and was to remain ‘the chief formative influence on his thought’.²⁰ For a time he looked to be fated to a lifetime of lower class drudgery as a draper’s assistant, but educational reforms and his own voracious reading habit resulted in his attainment of a place on a degree course at the Normal School of Science in Kensington in 1884. Here he studied biology under the tuition of Thomas Henry Huxley, one of the most prominent thinkers of the time and a man who was to have a pervasive influence on the young Wells, despite the fact that there was no personal contact between teacher and student. Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie in their 1973 biography of Wells attribute the figure of the ‘hero-scientist’ embodied in the Time Traveller (which was also a feature in The First Men on the Moon and The Island of Doctor Moreau²¹) to Huxley’s influence.²²

The identity of the protagonist of The Time Machine is ambiguous – he is never identified by name or specific profession, unlike the other characters introduced at the beginning of the novel (e.g. the Psychologist, the Medical Man) and to whom he recounts his adventures. Instead he is only ever referred to as ‘the Time Traveller’, but we can infer from the description of his surroundings and the company he keeps that he is a member of the leisured upper class. The text contains numerous references to ‘cigars’, ‘champagne’ and ‘servants’, and Wells himself stated his intention to portray a society of high-born intelligentsia: ‘the circumstances in which I now set the Time Traveller were all that I could imagine of solid upper-class comforts’²³. References to his status as an ‘Eminent Scientist’ [p.13] and to his publications: ‘my own seventeen papers upon physical optics’ [p.60] establish him as a man of science, thereby infusing him with authority.

Wells’ biographers also attribute his pessimistic outlook on the future of the world to Huxley, which was to express itself through the sense of ‘impending apocalypse’ which pervaded his scientific romances.²⁴ Huxley’s 1892 lecture entitled Evolution and Ethics contained the notions of a reversal of evolution – ‘retrogressive metamorphosis’ – and extinction – ‘all forms of life will die out’ which Wells subsequently extended in The Time Machine,²⁵ a copy of which he sent to Huxley upon publication.²⁶

Evolutionary theories are also evident in the novel’s literal interpretations of the consequences of concepts such as Herbert Spencer’s ‘survival of the fittest’ and Darwin’s ‘struggle for existence’ therefore reflecting the evolutionary views which rocked the latter half of the 19^th century. Wells’ rejection of religion early in life²⁷ left him open to an embrace of evolutionary theory and of the possibility of the subjugation of Nature by the assertion of man’s control over his own evolutionary direction (an idea which became a central tenet of the eugenic argument). His book found critics within the religious community, who took offence at the heretical conception of a Godless universe and Wells’ perceived dismissal of ‘the great religious and moral factors in human nature.’²⁸

Wells’ scientific pessimism is evident in The Time Machine, but becomes fully realised only after the Time Traveller’s discovery of the existence of the Morlocks. Before this he is afforded ample opportunity to contemplate the nature of the society he has discovered, and through his hypotheses Wells is able to expound his own Utopian visions. These originate from his reading of Plato’s Republic in his youth²⁹ and were developed throughout his life in the Utopian tracts of A Modern Utopia (1905) and Men Like Gods (1923). The Time Traveller’s first impression is that he has stumbled upon a futuristic paradise of harmony and balance: ‘"Communism," said I to myself’ [p.26], while the depiction of the Eloi as clothed in tunics and sandals evokes stock images of Greek Utopia.³⁰

Upon discovering the existence of the Morlocks the tone becomes increasingly negative as the Time Traveller is forced to abandon his Utopian theories.³¹ Instead, the focus shifts to his contemplation of the degeneration of mankind and its inevitable extinction: ‘It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane. The ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind.’[p.27] This is made explicit in his later travels into the more distant future, where giant crabs are the dominant species, which are themselves eventually acceded by the grotesque image of some unidentifiable ‘thing’ hopping fitfully about on the shore [p.76] as the sun begins to atrophy and die. The (probably promotional) article in the Pall Mall Gazette around the time of publication of The Time Machine extends the idea of the extinction of man, drawing parallels with the eventual inheritance of the earth by giant crabs in the novel, to give a doom-laden picture of the extinction of man, and the eventual end of the earth.³² Wells’ intention is to expose and undermine man’s biological arrogance: ‘the excessive egotism of the human animal [is such] that the bare idea of its extinction seems incredible to it’ and his smug faith in his assured and continuing dominance: ‘No, man’s complacent assumption of the future is too confident.’ He reiterates the warning contained in his novel, but seems resigned to having it ignored: ‘And when the thing [the extinction of man] happens, one may doubt if even then one will get the recognition one deserves.’³³ Indeed, most interpreted Wells’ work as the reviewer for Nature did - as light entertainment, not as seriously-intended moral allegory: ‘[The Time Machine] is well worth the attention of the scientific reader, for the reason that it is based so far as possible on scientific data, and while not taking it too seriously, it helps one to get a connected idea of the possible results of the ever-continuing processes of evolution’ [my italics].³⁴

While the Pall Mall Gazette article is full of exaggerated melodrama and journalistic hyperbole, it remains that Wells held a gloomy view of the future of humanity, informed by the fears of atavism (the reversion to primitive characteristics in the absence of evolutionary progress) which were a feature of the evolutionary debates of the period. The novel can be interpreted as a warning to Victorian society of the hypothetical implications of such concerns, but also of the potentially devastating consequences of contemporary social ills. Wells depicts no intermediate futures between the year 802,701 and his own time; the future he depicts is, as Lawton points out, a direct and logical projection of the Victorian society of his audience,³⁵ and one in which contemporary concerns are realized through an extreme and disturbing extrapolation of existing social ills. Wells’ warning to the Victorian society of his audience was overt, and its impact was reinforced in later years by his reputation as a prophet: Havelock Ellis asserted that of the prophets of the age (amongst whom he included George Bernard Shaw) ‘not one is better worth listening to than Mr H. G. Wells’.³⁶

Subsequently the novel reflects not only his scientific background but also contemporary social tensions and dilemmas, which were to combine a few years later with his political convictions and cause him to cease to be an artist and become a propagandist.³⁷ Fears of race degeneration are evoked in Wells’ portrayal of the Eloi,³⁸ who are physically and mentally degenerate; described by the Time Traveller as ‘frail’, ‘indolent’ and ‘on the intellectual level of one of our five-year-old children’ [p.22].³⁹ The Time Traveller interprets the degeneration of the descendents of humanity he encounters to be the consequence of social reforms which have resulted in the removal of selective pressures, and hence a loss of physical and intellectual faculties.

Darwin maintained that his maxim of the ‘struggle for survival’ was a metaphor⁴⁰ but it was interpreted literally by most, including Wells, who envisages physical and mental deterioration as the result of the elimination of this need for ‘struggle’:

‘For the first time I began to realize an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life – the true civilising process that makes life more and more secure – had gone steadily on to a climax.’ [p.27]

Excessive ease has become man’s downfall; the ‘too perfect security of the Upper-worlders’ [p.45] has hastened their inevitable demise.

There were also wide-spread concerns that class conflicts in Britain had resulted in a ‘two-nation state’, and Wells takes this to the extreme in his conception of a division which has extended the ‘present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer’ [p.43], and resulted in biological permanency in the form of two separate races.⁴¹ He projects existing concerns over a divided society to ‘a ghastly nemesis’⁴², where class stereotypes are exaggerated to produce a world where the working classes have descended into violent anarchy while the leisured upper classes have degenerated into useless frivolity.

The Morlocks represent the descendents of the industrial lower classes, driven into a subterranean world by the aristocracy. This depiction is rooted in Wells’ own childhood experience of below-stairs drudgery, spent in rooms ‘buried deeply in the ground…dimly lit in the daytime by light from overhead skylights made secure by prison-like metal gratings’⁴³. The subterranean existence of the Morlocks also reinforces the allegorical nature of the novel in drawing parallels between the future and the present state of Victorian society – ‘Even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth?’ [p.44]

Although this notion of a two-nation state is widely cited in the historical literature and appears elsewhere as a feature of the ‘social novel’ of the 1840s⁴⁴, Jose Harris challenges its objective validity, arguing that a dualistic model is too simplistic to encompass the more complex reality of inter-class conflict and sub-divisions⁴⁵. However, regardless of this objection, it is clear that the dominance of class categories at the time was inescapable and all embracing. The emphasis on class conflicts in The Time Machine also reveals another prominent issue of the time with which it was inextricably linked – race.⁴⁶

Received notions of racial superiority were pervasive in Victorian Britain as a result of British colonialism and the construction of master-servant relationships within occupied countries, which fostered a widespread perception of their inferiority.⁴⁷ More powerful than any distinct racial ideology was the fact of imperial dominance of non-white nations, which validated British assumptions of superiority long before social Darwinism gave scientific status to such beliefs.⁴⁸

Some critics have interpreted The Time Machine as expounding a racist message – Levy and Peart attribute ‘crude notions of racial hierarchy’ to Wells in their review of The Time Machine, and cite his views on miscegenation in his comments on Galton’s 1904 address to the Sociological Society in support: ‘I am told…in the case of the interbreeding of healthy white men and healthy black women about the Tanganyka region; the half-breed children are ugly, sickly and rarely live.’⁴⁹

Havelock Ellis accused him of harbouring narrow notions of racial superiority in his review of Mankind in the Making (1903): ‘Mr. Wells carries his insularity so far that he will not even admit any decency or virtue to the lower human races; the savage, he says, is simply a creature who smells and rots and starves’⁵⁰, and insists that contrary to Wells’ views of a Utopia formed from a limited fraction of the race, ‘the evolution of man, if it means anything, must affect the whole species, and not a single section.’⁵¹ In Anticipations (1901) Wells describes the construction of the New Republic, a ruling class made up of a ‘great federation of white English-speaking peoples’ [p.260] who will dominate over the ‘Yellows’ and the ‘non-white states’ by the year 2000. Here Wells’ assumptions of racial hierarchy on a global scale are overt. He contends that ‘quite apart from the dominated races, such an English-speaking state should have by the century end a practically homogenous citizenship of at least a hundred million sound-bodied and educated and capable men’ [p.261], thereby implying that ‘capable’ men (or women) will not be found among the non-white races.⁵²

However, in considering the notion of ‘race’ in Victorian Britain, it is important not to impose a modern understanding of the term in order to avoid a deceptively extreme analysis. Race is defined today as ‘a division of humankind having physical characteristics that are transmissible by descent’,⁵³ therefore establishing race as a category understood in terms of biological difference. This was not the case in Victorian Britain, where notions of racial ascendancy were embedded in affiliations with national groups and shared cultural and historical factors rather than any reference to biological categories. The term ‘race’ was often used synonymously with ‘nation’, or applied to concepts such as national health (sometimes referred to by the more disturbing phrase ‘racial hygiene’). Although many eugenicists, including Galton, held racist views (as did most of Victorian society), they did not consider race to be a scientific category.

This is evident in Wells’ more restrained consideration of the so-called racial divides among European populations. In Anticipations he questions the very notion of race as a biological category, and the assumption of Celtic superiority – ‘no one has ever proved or attempted to prove the existence of such races, the thing has always been assumed; they are dogmas with nothing but questionable authority behind them, and the onus of proof rests on the believer.’⁵⁴ With his scientific background, Wells was in a better position than most to identify the lack of biological evidence for any claim to racial purity, and therefore avoid thinking in terms of racial hierarchies.

The Time Machine depicts the social bifurcation of mankind through unrestrained industrialization, and takes this to the extreme in the result of two biologically separate races. However, Wells intended this to reflect critically upon the class concerns of his day rather than concern over immigration or the degeneration of the British race through corruption by external factors. Racial categories are referred to in order to emphasize the chasm between the societies of the Time Traveller and the future, not to assert a doctrine of white supremacy: ‘Then, think how narrow the gap between a Negro and a white man of our own times, and how wide the interval between myself and these of the Golden Age!’ [p.37]. Here temporal divides are more significant than geographical or cultural ones, therefore contradicting accusations of underlying prejudice in the novel.⁵⁵

However, a consideration of the metaphors provided by Wells, and their utilization in relation to racial concerns, is revealing. The Yale economist and public health advocate Irving Fisher referred to The Time Machine in his 1912 presidential address to the American Eugenics Research Association: ‘The Nordic race will…vanish or lose its dominance if, in fact, the whole human race does not sink so low as to become the prey, as H.G. Wells images, of some less degenerate animal’.⁵⁶ This is typical of American fears of immigration and subsequent degeneracy⁵⁷. Traditional historiographies have tended to associate racial concerns with the American and Continental eugenics movements, most infamously with the notions of racial purity of certain strands of the Nazi eugenics policy and the racially motivated genocide of the Third Reich.⁵⁸ Comparatively few British eugenicists lobbied for immigration laws, while in America the prominent fears of racial corruption and deterioration led to, among others, the Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882 and 1902.⁵⁹ However, this is not to say that anti-immigrant, and most conspicuously anti-Semite, feeling was not pervasive in Britain. The Whethams emphasized the danger of the differential birth rate in racial terms in 1897 through their concerns that the higher birth rate of Jews over Anglo-Saxons would result in racial deterioration: ‘these immigrants cannot be regarded as a satisfactory equivalent to the native population.’⁶⁰ Arnold White, a prominent anti-Semite propagandist reiterated these fears in Efficiency and Empire (1901) and added to existing concerns of degeneration a paranoia of political takeover, warning that ‘rule by foreign Jews is being set up.’⁶¹ This ‘anti-alien’ sentiment culminated in the United States in the passing of the Aliens Act of 1905, which enabled the government to refuse entry to steerage passengers considered to be diseased, criminals or potential paupers.⁶²

The extent to which race as a category was influential in the British eugenics movement is a subject of debate among historians. Kevles and Mazumdar assert that although racist attitudes prevailed in Victorian Britain, these were much less influential than the issue of class. Stone counters that the lack of emphasis on the factor of race in traditional historiographies of the British eugenics movement is the result of deliberate suppression by eugenicist propagandists after the atrocities of WWII and the Nazi regime.⁶³ Unease with their extreme eugenic theories, and subsequent attempts to extricate the British movement from being implicated, are evident even before the war. Julian Huxley and the anthropologist A.C. Haddon argued for the substitution of the term ‘race’ with that of ‘ethnic group’ - in order to avoid the misleading and unjustified biological implications of such language - partly in response to the claims of the Nazi regime that the Jews constituted a particular racial ‘type’ and were biologically homogenous.⁶⁴ Following the exposure of the inhuman extremes of the Nazi eugenics programme during WWII, British eugenicists sought, with new desperation, to distance themselves from racial associations in their struggle to preserve eugenics as a respectable and valid movement. Hence eugenic propagandists such as C.P. Blacker, the Honorary Secretary of the Eugenics Society after WWII, endeavoured to portray the British eugenics movement as principally motivated by class differences, in order to de-emphasize any embarrassing and unsavoury associations with Nazi racism.

However, an examination of pre-WWII literature reveals that there were more extremists who expressed racially-motivated opinions than can be easily dismissed, reflecting the sheer diversity of ideologies and doctrines which presented themselves under the term ‘eugenics’.

Robert Reid Rentoul’s Race Culture; or Race Suicide, published in 1906, condemns interbreeding between Britons and foreigners on the basis of ‘the terrible monstrosities produced by the intermarriage of the white man and the black’; while Charles Armstrong’s The Survival of the Unfittest (1910) exalts Britain as possessing ‘the finest human stock in the world’ and views the threat of immigration as one of resultant degeneration. Mainstream eugenicists were also motivated by racial concerns. Karl Pearson’s studies of the Jewish immigrant communities of the East End of London were full of presuppositions of their innate inferiority compared to the ‘native population’ [p.150], and Beatrice Webb cautioned American feminists of the social consequences of their insistence on asserting their ‘rights’ to reproductive control, warning that if they allowed the birth rate of their country to decline the nation would degenerate through the evil of miscegenation into ‘a coloured state’.⁶⁵ Even protested anti-racists did not escape the influence of the deeply institutionalised and almost unconscious racial assumptions which pervaded British thought: Lancelot Hogben called for the investigation of ‘race-specific characters,’ and J.B.S. Haldane assumed the existence of ‘true breeding’ human groups.⁶⁶

The fact that the eugenicists might couch their criticism of immigrant populations in the ‘coded language’ of national degeneration and refrain from referring to ‘aliens’ explicitly (although more than a few extremists were unrestrained in the expression of their prejudice) does not detract from the compelling evidence in favour of the fact that race had a considerable influence on the British eugenics movement, as an expression of cultural identity and, for a small but not insignificant number of extremists, as a biological category, had a considerable influence on the movement.⁶⁷

Although eugenic policies, or their advocacy, are never explicitly stated in The Time Machine, they are undoubtedly a theme of the novel. Rather than being a piece of eugenic propaganda, it is a work that, through a fantastical story, subtly reflects the concerns of contemporary society and hence some of the contributory factors in the rise of the early eugenics movement. However, Wells does allude to eugenics directly and explicitly in his socialist tracts,⁶⁸ and it is a feature of some of his other literary works. The New Machiavelli (1911) contains overt eugenic references, but is more concerned with a (largely autobiographical) discussion of sexual politics and the power of passion to override eugenic concerns. Evolutionary theories are the subject of discussion among the Cambridge friends of the novel’s protagonist, Richard Remington: ‘the talk was all of the Struggle for Existence and the survival not of the Best – that was nonsense, but of the fittest to survive’ [p.113]; while he attempts to justify his sexual exploits by appeal to the eugenic consideration of procreation as a service to the State: ‘sex means breeding, and breeding is a necessary function in a nation’ [p.157]. The novel also evoked political issues, reflecting Wells’ support for eugenics on the basis of socialist idealism in addition to scientific rationalism: ‘the ideas of a trained aristocracy and a universal education grew to paramount importance in my political scheme. It is but a short step from this to the question of the quantity and quality of births in the community’ [p.407].

The Time Traveller evokes methods of selective breeding in his contemplation of how the Morlocks may have come to exist:

‘Once [installed underground] they would no doubt have to pay rent, and not a little of it, for the ventilation of their caverns; and if they refused, they would starve or be suffocated for their arrears. Such of them as were so constituted as to be miserable and rebellious would die; and, in the end, the balance being permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the conditions of underground life, and as happy in their way, as the Upperworld people in theirs.’ [p.44]

Here, the evolution of the ancestors of the Morlocks is manipulated in order to produce a placid and productive industrial population that will sustain the lives of leisure of the Upper-worlders. The result is the cannibalistic and inhuman Morlocks, who eventually turn on the Eloi when their own food supplies run low: ‘thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his brother out of the ease and the sunshine. And now that brother was coming back – changed!’ [p.52]. Therefore they represent moral retribution for the cruel oppression they have endured at the hands of a parasitic aristocracy, and represent an attack on the Victorian upper-class for deliberately perpetuating an oppressive class system. However, while the Time Traveller attempts to rationalise the plight of the Eloi - now little more than ‘fatted cattle’ [p.56] for the Morlocks’ delectation - and objectively consider the resulting predation and terror of the Eloi as a ‘rigorous punishment of human selfishness’, he finds himself unable to extricate himself from sharing in their ‘degradation and Fear’, bound as he is by his sense of common humanity. The effect of Wells’ consistent allegorical parallels with the world of his audience is such that we too find ourselves unable to dismiss the Eloi as deserving of their fate with a ‘Carlyle-like scorn’⁶⁹ [p.56], and hence we are similarly implicated in the question which must inevitably arise from reading this apocalyptic vision of the fate of mankind – what can be done to prevent it?

Wells’ despair as to the fate of the world is expressed in a sense of the futility of intellectual endeavour and the empty vanity of progress (a message which is particularly striking in the image of the ‘decaying vestiges of books’ [p.60] in the ruined museum). However, in reading the novel one is driven to reject this pessimistic conclusion and instead to demand a solution to the apocalyptic horrors Wells presents us with. Irving Fisher’s speech urging action in the face of degeneracy is typical of contemporary attempts to resist and oppose Wells’ message of the inevitable, and similar responses were evoked by his novel of the following year. In The Island of Doctor Moreau, the ghoulish figure of the Doctor uses surgery to create half-human beasts, in a grim parody of evolution which expressed Wells’ belief that the evolutionary process was both blind and cruel. This again begged the question: how was man to escape these perceived arbitrary laws of nature and assert control over the direction of his evolutionary progress? ⁷⁰

The moral of the Morlocks is not a condemnation of selective breeding (Wells emphasizes the ‘happiness’ of the Morlocks in their adaptation), but is directed towards the cruel oppression by the aristocracy of its fellow man in order to serve its own selfish ends. In fact, the evidence of a once great culture: ‘no doubt the exquisite beauty of the buildings I saw was the outcome of the last surgings of the now purposeless energy of mankind’ [p.29], suggests that the specialisation of the Morlocks to their environment and social role was a very productive one in the interim years between the Victorian age of the Time Traveller and the world he encounters, leaving us to imagine many millennia of prosperity. It is evident that social reform has only served to aid and hasten degeneration by removing the factors that encourage strength and intelligence; with security comes weakness. Therefore artificial selective pressures must be applied in a technologically advanced society in order to avoid the degeneration of man’s physical and intellectual attainments; an approach which is argued for all the more forcefully due to Wells’ conviction that only a rational, systematic application of scientific thinking to the biological nature of man can save the race. This is conveyed in the Time Traveller’s joyful assertion to his contemporaries of the scientific improvements yet to come:

‘Some day all this will be better organised, and still better…the whole world will be intelligent, educated, and co-operating; things will move faster and faster towards the subjugation of Nature. In the end, wisely and carefully we shall readjust the balance of animal and vegetable life to suit our human needs.’ [p.28]

The implication of the novel is that the same methods of selective breeding which have so far improved plants and animals: ‘now a new and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle,’ [p.27-8] must be applied to the human population in order to achieve real progress. This is conveyed most powerfully in the persistent image of the white flowers, artificially bred for their desirable qualities: ‘what delicate and wonderful flowers countless years of culture had created’ [p.22]. It is significant that they are the only remaining artefacts of the Time Traveller’s adventures, whereas Weena, the product of a degenerate humanity, and whom the Time Traveller originally intended to bring back to his time, perishes. They are the persistent emblem of the Time Traveller’s revelations, and disregarding the incongruously sentimental tone of the epilogue, it could be argued that the flowers represent hope for mankind - that what has been achieved with them could be applied to the human race with similarly positive results.

The contradictory tone of The Time Machine is indicative of a fundamental paradox in Wells’ thought. His scientific pessimism manifested itself in his conviction of the purposeless of evolution: ‘Life is not the arbiter of its own destiny’,⁷¹ and the ultimate futility of progress, while his Utopias assert the faith in a purpose, a will to strive for a better existence: ‘The final attainment of this great synthesis…has an air of being a process independent of any collective or conscious will in man, as being the expression of a greater Will’.⁷² Similarly, The Time Machine presents a bleak depiction of the inevitability of Man’s overthrow, but leaves us with the possibility of improvement as our enduring hope.

Shaw presents his argument in a characteristically lengthy preface, in the form of an ironically toned letter to the drama critic Arthur Bingham Walkley (who had reserved his most vitriolic criticism for Shaw’s plays⁷⁴). He introduces the eugenic theme of the play almost immediately, through his criticism of the reticence of the nation in addressing the question of human breeding in the absence of selective pressures. Social reform has eliminated the action of Nature and yet provided nothing in its place:⁷⁵

‘Being cowards, we defeat natural selection under cover of philanthropy: being sluggards, we neglect artificial selection under cover of delicacy and morality.’⁷⁶ [p.25]

Shaw considered the establishment of a ‘population of capable voters’ to be of vital importance in order to save the nation from the incompetence of the lower classes. He, like many of his Fabian contemporaries, held the lower classes in contempt,⁷⁷ and argued that: ‘we must either breed political capacity or be ruined by it’ [p.25].

Shaw assumes that he is addressing an audience that is similarly influenced by the writings of ‘Schopenhauer and Nietzsche…and is concerned for the future of the race instead of for the freedom of [its] own instincts’[p.14]. Hence he introduces the themes of social responsibility and obligation in addition to the philosophical threads which pervade the play. Through the character of John Tanner and his controversial pamphlet ‘The Revolutionist’s Handbook’, Shaw advocates the need for a radical reconstruction of social values in order to attain a meritocracy of the Superman. However, his embrace of Nietzschean doctrine attracted criticism; G.K. Chesterton condemned Shaw for being influenced by Nietzsche’s scorn of the common man, and arguing for an improvement of man at the expense of a fondness for humanity in all its present imperfect glory.⁷⁸ Chesterton’s assertion, however, relies on an assumption of the continued quality of the human race, which, given the widespread concerns of race degeneration of the period, was by no means assured. Shaw acknowledges these fears in the preface, and argues, like Wells, the need for a scientific approach to combat this degeneration. He warns that ‘without a highly scientific social organization’ the result will be ‘a ruinous development of poverty, celibacy, prostitution, infant mortality, adult degeneracy…in short, there is no future for mankind’[p.17].

His plays were tools for the expression of his opinions, and he clearly valued the use of the creative medium as a platform for discussion, stating that ‘after all, the main thing in determining the artistic quality of a book is not the opinions it propagates, but the fact that the writer has opinions…for art’s sake alone I would not face the toil of writing a single sentence’ [pp.34-5]. In Man and Superman Shaw provides a lively exploration of the diversity of views on human breeding and the purpose of life. He uses the play to put forward contrasting views on the issues through his characters – ‘their points of view are…mine also’ whilst also powerfully foreshadowing the dangers of extreme eugenic policy, which threatened to reduce mankind to statistics at the expense of individuality:⁷⁹

‘Beware the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human…to the Superman, men and women are a mere species…outside the moral world.’ [p.171]

Numerous critics have commented on Shaw’s use of his plays to expatiate on his political and philosophical views, often at the expense of dramatic impact.⁸⁰ William Archer acknowledged Shaw’s use of the stage ‘as a blackboard to illustrate his lectures on things in general’ and considered Shaw ‘a philosophic humorist, with the art of explaining himself in dramatic form’.⁸¹ Max Beerbohm considered Man and Superman ‘the most complete expression of the most distinct personality in current literature’.⁸² Shaw’s voice is clear throughout, but nowhere more so than in the character of John Tanner, through whom Shaw is able to expound his views at length on the need for, and the means of attaining, the Superman. The context of dramatic literature enables him to be more extreme than would have perhaps been acceptable in, say, the opinion pages of a respected broadsheet. He expressed similar views on the need to remove social barriers in order to achieve optimal eugenic breeding elsewhere,⁸³ but with considerably more restraint.⁸⁴

The evidence in support of equating the polemic of Tanner with the views of his author is strong.⁸⁵ He claims to be a radical social reformer: ‘I shatter creeds and demolish idols’ [p.74]; similarly Shaw regularly invited controversy with his outspoken opinions on sexual reform.⁸⁶ Tanner is described as a ‘big man with a beard’ [p.47], therefore directly reflecting Shaw’s most distinctive feature, and it is reported that on the play’s first performance at Court Theatre in 1905, the actor playing Tanner was even made up to look specifically like Shaw.⁸⁷ In Act III, Tanner reappears as Don Juan, and again the autobiographical nature of the characterization is apparent. Tanner, as the modern-day Don Juan, is depicted not as a prolific philanderer, but as an intellectual and a confirmed bachelor, who deliberately evades Ann’s advances. Shaw himself was sexually ambivalent (one recent study has even argued that he was homosexual⁸⁸), and claimed that he was only interested in women for the purposes of literature.⁸⁹

The philosophical ideas of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche found particular resonance with the eugenics movement due to their assertion of the subordination of the will of the individual to a higher purpose. Shaw’s metaphysical ideas on the Life Force and the Superman are expressed in the ‘Don Juan in Hell’ interlude, which signifies a departure from the realism of Shaw’s previous plays in favour of symbolism. Maurice Valency attributes Shaw’s exposition of the Life Force to his search for God and a purpose worth dedicating his life to, and to the influence on his thought of the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.⁹⁰

Schopenhauer was a German philosopher who was impressed by Kant’s doctrine of the ‘thing-in-itself’, which Kant maintained we can have no knowledge of given that it exists in the noumenal world. Kant’s influence is evident in Schopenhauer’s principle work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation), first published in Germany in 1818. However, while Kant constructed a dichotomy of the knowable phenomenal world and the inaccessible noumenal world, Schopenhauer distinguished between a knowledge of the external world through perceptual experience, and an awareness of ourselves from within. Through this awareness, he argued, we can obtain direct knowledge of the ‘thing-in-itself’, or as Schopenhauer conceived it: the Will to Exist. Schopenhauer considered the Will to be the fundamental reality of the universe, being a force independent of ourselves but which is directly knowable through its action.

Schopenhauer saw the effect of the Will to Exist as subordinating the individual in order to achieve the continuance of life. It drives our actions, while we, unconscious of its exploitation, couch our behaviour in the socially acceptable language of love and validate the impulse with the institution of marriage:

‘The sexual impulse…knows how to assume very skilfully the mark of an objective admiration, and thus to deceive our consciousness; for nature requires this stratagem to attain its ends.’⁹¹

Therefore, that which we conceive of as love is in fact the subordination of the interests of the individual by the over-riding drive of the Will to Exist. People are brought together not through a mutual affection, but through the action of the Will to Exist of the as-yet unborn child who will result from their union: ‘The growing inclination of two lovers is really already the will to live of the new individual which they can and desire to produce.’⁹²

The doctrine of the Will to Exist had a pervasive influence on Shaw, and instilled in him the idea that the passions determine, and ultimately dominate, the life of the intellect.⁹³ This is expressed in Man and Superman; Don Juan envisages a future where the true purpose of the union between two people is acknowledged and celebrated: ‘The great central purpose of breeding the race…a purpose no longer to be confused with the gratification of personal fancies.’ [p.160] The triumph of the Life Force over the individual intellectual is expressed through the relationship of Tanner and Ann. They are drawn together through the action of the Life Force, which Tanner recognises and attempts to oppose, but to which he eventually surrenders:

‘I love you. The Life Force enchants me…but I am fighting for my freedom…for my self, one and indivisible’[p.205].

Ann too refers to the dominant power of the Life Force in terms of the perils of childbirth: ‘it will not be all happiness for me. Perhaps death’ [p.206]. Here she acknowledges the subordination of her own self-interest and security to the pursuit of the ultimate goal – procreation and the production of the Superman.

The Superman was the subject of widespread discussion in the Victorian period, principally due to contemporary translations and interpretations of Nietzsche that were widely read in intellectual circles. Nietzsche was influenced by Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the Will to Exist; his discovery of Die Welt while studying philology at the University of Leipzig constituted his introduction to philosophy and had a profound effect on his thought, which is evident in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872). He agreed with Schopenhauer’s notion of a Godless world of relentless suffering, but objected to his overtly pessimistic conception of the value of existence.⁹⁴ Although Nietzsche has been interpreted as a nihilist, he was in fact an extremely positive thinker. He attempted to present a life-affirming and positive means of overcoming the nihilistic reaction he saw as an inevitable consequence of the Death of God and the erosion of traditional values.⁹⁵ He was firmly convinced of the falsity of the ‘God-hypothesis’, and instead emphasized the need to direct man’s efforts towards his own development, in order to attain a ‘higher humanity’, which would infuse existence with value and meaning. In ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ (1883-5) the central character is assigned the task of directing man: ‘an ugly stone which requires a sculptor’,⁹⁶ towards a better future. The development of the Ubermensch (or ‘overman’) is proclaimed to represent ‘the meaning of the earth’.

Shaw interpreted Schopenhauer’s doctrine in a similarly positive way. While Schopenhauer presented the Will as the purposeless and irrational driving force of life, embodying an essentially pessimistic view of life as senseless and painful, Shaw saw this driving energy as rational, dynamic and positive, its purpose being the ascendancy of mankind and the ultimate production of the Superman. In his conception of the Life Force Shaw found his God, which is emphasized by the introduction to the Revolutionist’s Handbook: ‘If there were no God…it would be necessary to create him’ [p.215]. Shaw embraced this old adage enthusiastically, making the Life Force his religion and expounding the doctrine of the Superman through the medium of the play. Don Juan asserts that the pursuit of the Superman is the only logical activity in a world where God is dead: ‘religion for me [was] a mere excuse for laziness, since it had set up a God who looked at the world and saw it was good, against the instinct in me that looked through my eyes at the world and saw it could be improved’ [p.165].

The doctrine of the Superman did not originate with Nietzsche;⁹⁷ it can be found in the writings of the satirist Lucian (c.120- the Greek 180 AD) and features in Goethe’s Faust (published in 1808 and 1832).⁹⁸ It is not clear whether Nietzsche intended his conception of the Superman to be understood in evolutionary terms, or whether he meant to convey something more individualistic in nature – a mastery of one’s desires and application of one’s powers within one’s own lifetime. Regardless of his intended meaning, Nietzsche came to be associated with eugenic thought and featured in much of the eugenics writing of the 20^th century. Fears of racial deterioration and notions of regeneration found resonance with perceived Nietzschean theories of ‘the rule of the best, an aristocracy of taste, and a leadership that scorned the weak and degenerate,’⁹⁹ and it is not difficult to see how such interpretations were formed, given Nietzsche’s emphasis on the distinction between ‘higher types’ and the ‘herd’ in Zarathustra. Similarly, although Die Welt was a popular and influential text in the 19^th century among many diverse thinkers, its doctrine of the Will to Exist found particular resonance with the eugenic notion of the subordination of the individual in the service of a higher interest – the State.

Mazumdar states in her study of the British Eugenics Society that the official line concerning Nietzsche was one of caution,¹⁰⁰ but nevertheless his philosophy came to be embraced by such prominent figures as Havelock Ellis (who wrote one of the first English-language pieces on Nietzsche in 1898), F.C.S. Schiller and Maximilian Mugge, who eulogised Nietzsche’s influence on the eugenics movement:

‘To Sir Francis Galton belongs the honour of founding the Science of Eugenics. To Friedrich Nietzsche belongs the honour of founding the Religion of Eugenics. Both aim at a Superman…an ideal race of supermen, as superior to the present mankind…as man is superior to the worm.’¹⁰¹

References to Nietzsche were principally used to support the novel theories of political thinkers such as these, regardless of the accuracy of their interpretations. Shaw certainly interpreted the Superman as a biological entity which could be achieved by means of selective breeding, and saw its attainment as a means to accelerate the ascendancy of socialism; Nietzsche’s objective was very different - the defeat of European nihilism, of which socialism was a feature.¹⁰²

Shaw goes on to assert the necessity of, and suggest a methodology for, the production of the Superman in The Revolutionist’s Handbook.

The Revolutionist’s Handbook is a focal point in the play, present in the opening and closing scenes¹⁰⁴ but with no specific reference to its contents, and therefore our curiosity is aroused as a result. However, Shaw includes it as an appendix, and it is here that we most clearly see the exposition of his eugenic faith. He presents an impassioned argument for the abolition of social institutions that restrict freedom of procreation and stand in the way of the advent of the Superman.

The treatment of The Revolutionist’s Handbook in the play is revealing, particularly in the controversy and scandal it arouses in the character Roebuck Ramsden, who represents an intellectually out-dated generation. He is introduced as ‘an Evolutionist from the publication of the Origin of Species’ [pp.41-2], therefore placing him in the context of contemporary thought and introducing him as a man who considers himself a radical, open-minded and progressive figure. We learn later that he has sacrificed social advancement (in terms of titles and honours) for his out-spoken views: ‘You know that I am plain Roebuck Ramsden when other men who have done less have got handles to their names, because I have stood for equality and liberty of conscience…I lost chance after chance through [my] advanced opinions’ [p.46]. Regarding his eugenic views, we remain ignorant, although Tanner’s accusation that he has ‘not an idea in his head later than eighteen sixty’ [p.51], is suggestive. Francis Galton, the founding father of eugenics, published his first work on the subject in 1865 (although the term was not coined until 1883) and his influential book Hereditary Genius in 1869.¹⁰⁵ While Tanner’s comment serves as a general indictment of Ramsden’s ignorance in the face of modern views, from an interpretative position of eugenics it could be seen as an accusation that while Ramsden accepts the theory of evolution, he refuses to consider its implications or logical extensions with respect to the improvement of the human race.

However, it is clear that regardless of the nature of Ramsden’s eugenic views, he objects to Tanner’s pamphlet on the basis not of its promotion of selective breeding of the race, but of its ‘licentiousness’ and advocacy of ‘Anarchism and Free Love’ [p.46].¹⁰⁶ Despite Ramsden’s claims of progressive, freethinking – ‘I demand the right to think for myself…I am as advanced as ever I was’[p.53] – the ideas of the Revolutionist’s Handbook are too much for him. Here Shaw’s satirical style is in evidence as he exposes the hypocrisy of Ramsden’s dismissal of the book. For all his protestations of independence of thought and contempt for popular opinion – ‘I detest [the British public’s] prejudices; I scorn its narrowness’ [p.53] – he readily admits to not having read Tanner’s book and to basing his dismissal on ‘what the papers say of it’ [p.45]. In ridiculing Ramsden and connecting the moral outrage at the book to his ‘obsolete ideas’ [p.49], Shaw presents his audience with a challenge, daring us not to be shocked at his suggestions but to accept them as inevitable progress in a modern world.

The Handbook asserts the political necessity of the Superman, arguing that the fall of the aristocracy has resulted in a ‘Proletariat Democracy’ [p.226], which can only be debilitating given the ignorance of the common man: ‘they [the proletariat] are still riff-raff; and to hand the country over to riff-raff is national suicide’ [p.248]. In order to combat this threat, Tanner asserts the need to establish a ‘Democracy of Supermen’ [p.228]. The Superman is envisaged to be ‘some sort of good looking philosopher-athlete’ [p.216], but beyond this his qualities are not specified save for a general ‘superiority of the unconscious self’ [p.218]. Despite this ambiguity, Shaw urges the pursuit of the Superman through a method of ‘trial and error’ [p.216],¹⁰⁷ and refers to the Perfectionist Oneida Community’s experiments with selective breeding¹⁰⁸ in order to support his argument.¹⁰⁹ This is highly significant, as it refers to a real event, and therefore transports us out of the realm of fiction and reinforces the fact that Shaw is using the Handbook to advocate the practical implementation of eugenic theory.

What is clear is that the Superman will be attained by selective breeding. Social progress is presented as a mirage; Tanner acknowledges that, under perfect circumstances, social reform would be sufficient to achieve man’s improvement: ‘the difference between Man as he is and Man as he might become, without further evolution, under millennial conditions of nutrition, environment and training, is enormous’ [p.230]. However, he despairs of the ability of politics to achieve such progress in practise: ‘We must frankly give up the notion that Man as he exists is capable of net progress…Man will return to his idols and his cupidities, in spite of all ‘movements’ and all revolutions, until his nature is changed’ [p.234-5], and subsequently asserts his conviction that the only hope for the future of man lies in the improvement of his biological nature.

His argument for a biological approach to race improvement is reinforced by his allusions to evolutionary theory, the abandonment of Lamarckian theories of heredity¹¹⁰ and the evocation of the widespread contemporary fear of inevitable atavism in the absence of selective pressures:

‘a civilisation in which lusty pugnacity and greed have ceased to act as selective agents and have begun to obstruct and destroy, rushes downwards and backwards with a suddenness that enables an observer to see with consternation the upward steps of many centuries retraced in a single lifetime’ [p.235].

The influence of evolutionary theory is also evident in the aphorism ‘those whom we called brutes had their revenge when Darwin showed us that they are our cousins’ [p.261]. This emphasizes the status of man as another animal species, which is reinforced by his reference to ‘human livestock’ [p.245], and the establishment of a ‘human stud farm’ [p.246]. The logical implication is that methods of selective breeding, which are applied with such success to plants and animals, should similarly be turned towards the human population.

He maintains the need to implement a rational, scientific method of breeding by ‘intentional and well-considered contrivance’ [p.218] in order to overcome Man’s blundering institutions’ [p.223]. Indeed, it is the social institutions of society which Shaw objects most strongly to, arguing that class divisions and notions of social propriety present barriers to the optimum breeding which is necessary to develop the Superman. The advent of this saviour of man is impeded by the social obstacles which prevent procreation between ‘a countess and a navvy or a duke and a charwoman…equality is essential to good breeding’ [p.218],¹¹¹ and moral values which insist that procreation occurs only within the confines of marriage. Shaw claims that marriage is not necessary for ‘effective’ reproduction: ‘there is no evidence that the best citizens are the offspring of congenial marriages’ [p.219]. He mockingly dismisses objections – ‘the shrieks of the romantic’ [p.219] – and instead presents a compelling case in favour of the fact that marriage as an institution must necessarily change with the times. He argues that his proposals represent simply a continuance of the ‘progressive modification of the marriage contract’ [p.221] which has already altered so radically as to render ‘modern English marriage’ as different from its early 19^th century equivalent as ‘Byron’s…from Shakespear’s’ [p.221].

In further defence of his suggestions, Shaw urges those who find ‘the whole conception of intelligent breeding absurd and scandalous’ [p.248] to consider the already politicised nature of upper-class marriage in its restriction to a small section of ‘acceptable’ society. He argues that the increasing social importance of ‘the tinker’s marriage’ [p.248] demands State attention, and that the rising visibility and economic significance of the working classes renders their breeding a matter of national interest.

Support for State control is emphasized throughout The Revolutionist’s Handbook. Although he does not propose a precise method for the attainment of the Superman, Shaw suggests the establishment of a ‘State Department of Evolution’ [p.245] in order to oversee the ‘political breeding’ [p.255] of the race, and considers the provision of incentives to encourage desirable women to undertake the task of procreation: ‘she should clearly be secured a sufficient reward for that natural service to make her willing to undertake and repeat it’ [p.246].

This notion of reproduction as a state activity as opposed to an individual and private act resonates through the play. While Violet’s illegitimate pregnancy shocks and disturbs the other characters, Tanner alone congratulates her: ‘the fact of your not being legally married matters not a scrap either to your own worth or to our real regard for you’ [p.82]. The doctrine of the Life Force renders motherhood the aim of Nature, and marriage an incidental detail,¹¹² and therefore condemnation of childbirth outside of wedlock is informed by a received notion of moral propriety. Motherhood is portrayed as the ‘highest purpose and greatest function’ of a woman. Later Tanner says of Violet that she ‘is going to do the State a service’ [p.67], thereby reinforcing the notion of the social significance of childbirth, which was so typical of the collectivist position. Shaw also introduces the notion of required standards in order to obtain social permission to reproduce: ‘the woman who pleads her mother’s authority is unfit to bear citizens to a free people’ [p.97]. Therefore the collectivist position (notably upheld by Shaw, Wells and the Webbs) of reproduction as a duty and a privilege is asserted in opposition to the notion of the universal right to reproduction upheld by the individualists (who included the radical feminist Annie Besant).¹¹³

Shaw was outspoken in his assertion of the necessity for sexual reform. In his letter to The Times in 1907¹¹⁴, Shaw argued that the reported polygamy among the Kulin people was not ‘unreasonable’, in the face of the widespread moral outrage displayed by his contemporaries. Contrary to accusations that such a system was ‘abhorrent’ and ‘revolting’, he contrasted it with British marriage traditions which he perceived as being less suited to the providence of a high quality race, given the social restrictions on optimum and productive breeding. He evoked the fears of racial degeneration which were so prevalent at the time: ‘a nation, which, as Sidney Webb and Professor Karl Pearson have warned us, is perishing for want of well-bred children’, and attributed this to notions of moral propriety among the middle and upper classes: ‘[a woman] often refuses to become a mother because her religious and social training has taught her to regard motherhood as a department of original sin, and to glory, not in the possession of children, but of a husband.’ He also evoked the notion of childbirth as a social obligation, and a woman’s duty in particular, referring to the wasted lives of ‘thousands of first rate maiden ladies in barrenness’. Such attitudes were also held by many of Shaw’s contemporaries, including Wells¹¹⁵ and Francis Galton.¹¹⁶ Karl Pearson, who considered ‘the woman question’ to be, next to socialism, the most important and pressing issue of the day,¹¹⁷ was almost unique among the eugenicists in his support of feminism.

Throughout the play, Shaw argues for the removal of the restrictions that impede the coming of the Superman, who represents the only hope for a race in danger of degeneration and ruin. He acknowledges that any suggestion of the absolute abolition of marriage is fated to cause scandal and outrage [p.221], but maintains his objection to it: ‘Marriage, or any other form of promiscuous monogamy, is fatal to large States because it puts its ban on the deliberate breeding of man as a political animal’ [p.255]. Shaw considered the institution of marriage as it stood to be promiscuous, in terms of the formation of unions on the basis of licentious passion without regard to eugenic consequences. He also considered it hypocritical, asking: ‘what is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?’ [p.156]. The play successfully undermines the vanity of social etiquette by exposing this hypocrisy: Shaw ridicules the society which condones wilful sexual abandonment and promiscuity within marriage, but condemns the same behaviour without. He sees a double standard inherent in the society that would applaud a woman having twelve children by one husband, but would criticize the woman who had twelve children by twelve different husbands, although this method ‘would have replenished the world perhaps more effectively’ [p.156].

His embrace of the doctrine of the Life Force led him to demand something higher, something more enduring, than the satisfaction of base carnal desire, and this is the enduring message of the play in its entirety: the search for some ‘immortal work into which they can build the best of themselves’ [p.249]. Don Juan, the great literary hero, surrenders his existence to the higher purpose of the Life Force, and even the priggish Dona Ana is converted, ultimately embracing the mission of man, discarding her notions of propriety and exiting with the demand: ‘I believe in the Life to Come – A father! A father for the Superman!’[p.173].

This moral is made all the more emphatic by its repetition in the preface to the play, where Shaw, stripped of any literary disguise, expounds the ‘religion’ of the Life Force and the Superman:

‘This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognised by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.’ [p.32]

The Eugenics of Wells and Shaw

Much of Wells’ and Shaw's eugenics can be attributed to their socialism. They were both members of the Fabian society, set up in 1884 by Sidney and Beatrice Webb with the objective of bringing about social reconstruction and control through infiltration of the Liberal Party, and hence the achievement of reform through legislation. The Fabian society was made up of respectable, middle-class intellectuals, who held the working classes in contempt¹¹⁸ and embraced eugenics due to its potential to bring about a ‘worthy elite of competent receivers’¹¹⁹ which would save Britain from the perceived perils of a democracy of 'riff-raff’.¹²⁰

Karl Pearson was implored to join the Society by Shaw, with whom he had a close, if occasionally antagonistic, friendship.¹²¹ Throughout the course of their long correspondence, they discussed political and social questions and Shaw ‘dutifully subscribed’¹²² to Biometrika, which Pearson founded in 1901 with Galton and W.F.R. Weldon, with the aim of presenting ‘statistical theory, clothed with biological terminology’.¹²³

Despite the similarity of their political orientation and their shared view of socialism as the means with which to achieve progress, Wells and Shaw held very different opinions on eugenics, and the methods through which the improvement of the race should be attained. This can be attributed to the dissimilar objectives which influenced their eugenics ideas; Shaw’s desire for the development of the Superman caused him to oppose negative eugenics and instead encourage the removal of social restrictions to optimum breeding. He considered that ‘marriage customs and prejudices’ stood in the way of the optimisation of ‘good stocks’: ‘It seems a national loss to limit the husband progenitive capacity to the breeding capacity of one woman, or the wife’s to an experiment with one father only’¹²⁴ He dismissed the importance of upbringing on the production of quality individuals; instead his conception of the means to producing the Superman rested entirely on the event of childbirth. ¹²⁵ He considered that procreation could be separated from ‘the domestic and sympathetic function of marriage, or even its selfish sexual function’, arguing for the freedom for people ‘who have never seen each other before and never intend to see each other again, to produce children’.¹²⁶

Wells’ pessimism as to the cessation of evolutionary progress and the degeneration of the race led him to embrace negative eugenic theory, which advocated the sterilization of the ‘unfit’ in order to eliminate them from the population. He considered science to be the means of stemming the tide of degeneracy, but opposed the possibility of breeding for positive characteristics on the basis that science, as it stood, was inadequate to identify the qualities that should be bred for.¹²⁷ In his comment on Galton’s address to the Sociological Society in 1904, he opposed Galton’s notion of ‘hereditary genius’, and maintained that social factors could not be extricated from innate ones when considering individual success.¹²⁸ He suggested that ‘eminent judges or successful scientific men’ might have achieved their positions through ‘a special knowledge of the channels of professional advancement’ rather than any hereditary factor, and that criminals might possess qualities of ‘intelligence, initiative and originality’ which have been corrupted by ‘the ‘impossible conditions’ of their environment. He refuted Galton’s claim to the existence of a universal list of ‘desirable qualities’¹²⁹ by which to detect the ‘best specimens’ on the grounds that such characteristics are too subjective and complex to be identified,¹³⁰ and therefore defy scientific analysis. In doing so he undermined the apparent simplicity of the eugenicist’s maxim: ‘superior persons must breed with superior persons, inferior persons must not have offspring at all’¹³¹ and exposed the lack of scientific basis of their studies.¹³² In the absence of an ability to identify the ‘best’ or even the ‘better’ of the species, Wells advocated the application of negative eugenics in an imitation of the evolutionary process:

‘The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilization of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stick lies.’¹³³ Wells reinforced this desperate necessity the following year: ‘it is our business to ask what Utopia will do with…the low-grade man…? These people will have to be in the descendent phase, the species must be engaged in eliminating them; there is no escape from that’.¹³⁴

Wells was still supportive of such schemes when he came to write The Science of Life in 1929: ‘six thousand operations have been performed in California alone and it would be difficult to find fault with the results’,¹³⁵ regretting only the delay in implementing similar programmes in Britain.

Shaw was in vehement opposition to negative eugenics, reasoning that the implementation of such a program would have included his own parents, with the result that ‘I should not at present be in existence’.¹³⁶ He also questioned assumptions of heredity, but, unlike Wells, saw this inadequacy of knowledge as precluding any restriction on birth, rather than encouraging it. In Man and Superman he insists that our insufficient knowledge renders us unable to decide what might constitute an undesirable union, and therefore we are not justified in limiting the breeding of any sector of society: ‘in the event of our notions of health being erroneous (which to some extent they most certainly are) the error will be corrected by experience instead of confirmed by evasion’ [p.219]. This reflects Shaw’s own priorities; his objective is primarily to achieve the improvement of the race rather than to combat its degeneration.

Shaw condemned negative eugenicists by exposing the brutality of the logical implications of their theories in his infamous lecture to the Eugenics Education Society. His claims that ‘a part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber’¹³⁷ provoked widespread outrage,¹³⁸ which was perhaps foreseeable given Shaw’s notorious volatility and his pleasure at eliciting controversy.¹³⁹ Shaw constructed a public persona for himself to combat what he saw as debilitating shyness,¹⁴⁰ which, given his predilection for dramatics, often manifested itself in outspoken extremism.¹⁴¹ Stone applauds Shaw for exposing the extreme logical consequences of the policies the eugenicists advocated, therefore revealing the cowardice of those who expounded the necessity of the elimination of ‘undesirables’ but were unwilling to admit the unsavoury nature of what this might mean in practice.¹⁴²

Shaw declared in a letter to the New York Times that those who proved themselves unfit should ‘be done away with…nicely, kindly and in the most painless way possible’¹⁴³. Such a statement echoes (and ridicules) the words of advocates of negative eugenics such as Havelock Ellis, who claimed, ‘the feeble minded, realising their own weakness, are willing and even anxious to be in this way protected against themselves’¹⁴⁴. Through his literary and public work Shaw satirised the language of the eugenicists, exposing the hypocrisy inherent in their assertions and hence undermining the claims of those who argued that negative eugenic methods were benevolent and merciful.

Conclusion

Through an analysis of The Time Machine and Man and Superman, it is possible to extract an understanding both of the concerns of the society within which the authors were writing and of their individually held beliefs regarding eugenics.

Contemporary fears of degeneration, evolutionary pessimism and a divided society are strikingly realised through Wells’ depiction of the future. The novel expounds the importance of utilizing science in order to avoid the extreme consequences of existing concerns, and therefore reflects the pervasive influence of science on a man who was one of Britain’s foremost thinkers and authors. While its eugenic content is subtle and implicit, Wells’ views expressed elsewhere reveal him to have supported the cause of negative eugenics, motivated by a faith in the power of scientific breeding to rescue the race from the inevitable degeneracy asserted by his interpretation of evolutionary theory.

Man and Superman is a platform for the notorious Shavian social and sexual radicalism. The philosophical themes it contains had some resonance in the eugenics movement as a whole, but had a profound influence on the eugenic views of Shaw. His objective of the improvement of the race and the attainment of the Superman drove him to oppose negative eugenics and embrace reproductive freedom across social and moral barriers, a position which attracted much notoriety.

That Wells and Shaw held such contradictory views demonstrates the sheer diversity of thought which made up the eugenics movement. An examination of these two men reveals an expansive view of the movement, given the diverse areas to which their work can be related, encompassing issues of class and race, notions of social obligation and heredity and philosophical themes.

Therefore an analysis of The Time Machine and Man and Superman provides us with much more than an understanding simply of the words on the pages. It presents us with an insight into the minds and personalities of two prolific and influential figures, and, through the lens of their fiction, an appreciation of the British eugenics movement through their eyes.

Notes and References

UCL: Special Collections, 140 Hampstead Road, NW1.

Pearson to Sharpe (who later became his wife), Jan 6, 1888.

Karl Pearson papers, Cabinet II, D3.

Shaw to Pearson, March 24, 1890. Karl Pearson papers, file 627. (p.26)

Shaw to Pearson, Oct. 22 1901, Karl Pearson Papers, Shaw File.

Manuscripts Room, UCL.

Ellis, Havelock, The Problem of Race Regeneration (1911).

Ervine, St John, Bernard Shaw: His Life, Work and Friends, Constable and Company (1956)

Evans, T.F., The Critical Heritage, Routledge and Kegan Paul (1976)

Hammond, J.R., An H.G. Wells Companion, Macmillan (1979)

Haynes, Roslynn D., H.G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future: The Influence of Science on his Thought, Macmillan (1980)

Kevles, Daniel J., In the Name of Eugenics, University of California Press (1985)

Johnson, H., The Evolution of Man and its Control, Popular Science Monthly 76 (Jan 1910)

New York Times, Oct 23, 1933, p.13.

McLaren, Angus, Birth Control in Nineteenth-Century England (1978)

Newsome, David, The Victorian World Picture: Perceptions and Introspections in an Age of Change. John Murray (1997).

Parrinder, Patrick, H.G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, Routledge and Kegan Paul (1972)

Pearson, Hesketh, Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality, Collins (1942)

Pearson, Hesketh, Modern Men and Mummers (1921)

Shaw, G.B., Man and Superman (1903)

Shaw, G.B., Pygmalion (1916)

Shaw, G.B., Back to Methuselah (1921)

Shaw, G.B., Saint Joan (1924)

Shaw, G.B., The Apple Cart (1930)

Stone, Daniel, Breeding Superman, Liverpool University Press (2002)

Valency, Maurice, The Cart and the Trumpet: The Plays of GBS (1973)

Wells, H.G., The Time Machine (1895)

Wells, H.G., The New Machiavelli (1911)

Wells, H.G., Mankind in the Making, (1903)

Wells, H.G., Anticipations (1901)

Wells, H.G., A Modern Utopia (1905)

Wells, H.G., Wells and Huxley, The Science of Life (1929)

Wells, H.G., The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)

Wells, H.G., Certain Personal Matters (1901)

JENNY JOPSON graduated from Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 2003 with a BA in Natural Science. She specialised in History and Philosophy of Science in her final year, and chose to write her dissertation on eugenic themes in literature as an attempt to placate the frustrated English student within her. She now lives in Somerset, but intends to escape the West Country in favour of the South American jungle before pursuing a career in science communication.

1. McLaren, p.151.

2. For the purpose of this study I will be focusing on the pre-WWI period.

3. Some examples are The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley(1863), The Road to the Open by Arthur Schnitzler (1908) and The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle (1912).

4. As early as Plato, there have been ‘patriots and philosophers who aimed to uplift not only the environment of the race, but its inborn character too.’ Johnson, p.49.

5. From an article in the Yale Review, 1913, cited in Kevles, p. 72.

6. Francis Galton noted the achievements of selection in obtaining true-breeding varieties of animals and plants and wondered ‘could not the race of men be similarly improved?’ Kevles, p.1.

7. Kevles, p.71.

8. Karl Pearson’s statistical studies revealing the differential birth rate were substantiated by a comprehensive survey of the population of London in 1906, which revealed that the most prolific breeders were found among the lower classes. Kevles, p.74.

9. It was reported that eight out of eleven volunteers in Manchester had to be rejected on the basis of physical unfitness. Kevles, p.73.

10. Kevles, p.70

11. McLaren, p.144.

12. The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley features a race that is free to Do-As-You-Like, and consequently devolves to apes.

13. Wells acknowledges the fearsome power of Germany in Anticipations: ‘their rapid economic progress is to a very large extent, indeed, a triumph of intelligence, and their political and probably their military and naval services are still conducted with a capacity and breadth of view that find no parallel in the world’ p.252.

14. Stone, p.72.

15. Kevles, p.76.

16. Stone, p.101.

17. Ibid., p.104.

18. Ibid., p.125.

19. Science is also a feature of Wells’ political writings. In A Modern Utopia, Wells presents his vision of ‘the scientifically planned welfare state’, p.x.

20. John Lawton, Introduction to The Time Machine, Everyman (1995), p.xxxiii.

21. Haynes, p.16.

22. Mackenzie, p.120.

23. H.G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, cited in Lawton, p.xlvi.

24. This pessimism is manifested most strongly in The Time Machine in its conception of the inevitable degeneration and eventual extinction of man, and is shared by his characters: ‘He, I know – for the question had been discussed among us long before The Time Machine was made – thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilisation only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end’ [p.83].

25. In an early draft of the novel, the differentiation of man into two separate races is followed by a marsupial phase, thereby further reinforcing the theme of a reversal of Darwinian evolution. Mackenzie, p.123n.

26. John Lawton, Introduction to The Time Machine, Everyman (1995), p.xxxiii.

27. Religion – or lack of it – was also a factor in Wells’ Utopian fantasies – in Mankind in the Making he asserts that a central feature of the new world will be the rejection of the belief in original sin. Parrinder, p.104.

28. Review in The Spectator, 27th June, 1895. Cited in Lawton, p.88.

29. Hammond, p.9.

30. There are a limited number of models that reappear in Utopian literature, principally Medieval, Pre-Raphaelite, and Greek, which is used here, and would have been recognisable as a Utopian image to a reader of the time, therefore misleading the reader as the Time Traveller is misled.

31. Indeed, the contrived sentimentality of the epilogue – ‘even when mind and strength have gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness lived on in the heart of man’ [p.83] – rings hollow when considered alongside the overwhelming pessimism of the rest of the novel, and is contradicted by the Time Traveller’s reports of the moral degeneration of the Eloi in addition to that of their physical and intellectual faculties – ‘it will give you an idea, therefore, of the strange deficiency in these creatures, when I tell you that none made the slightest attempt to rescue the weakly crying little thing which was drowning before their eyes’ [p.38].

32. Wells also published an article of a similar nature, ‘On Extinction’, in Chambers Journal, 1893.

33. Wells, Certain Personal Matters, p.119.

34. Parrinder, p.8.

35. Lawton, p.xxxv.

36. Parrinder, p.94.

37. Bergonzi, p.61.

38. The theme of degeneration and atavism – the reversion to primitive characteristics – is also found in other novels of the time, such as Charles Kingsley’s novel The Water Babies of 1863, which features a race that is free to ‘Do-as-you-like’ and as a result devolves into apes. Levy and Peart.

39. The Time Traveller’s matches, a symbol of primitive technology, are significant in reinforcing the Eloi’s mental and technological degeneracy: ‘I had wasted almost half the box in entertaining the Upper-worlders, to whom fire was a novelty.’ [p.49]

40. Lawton, p.32.

41. ‘Gradually, the truth dawned on me: man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals’ [p.42].

42. Newsome, p.256.

43. Wells’ youngest son Anthony West attributes his father’s associations between the lower classes and subterranean existence to this gloomy and cheerless experience, in his 1983 biography of Wells. Lawton, p.97.

44. Pick, p.159.

45. Harris, p.8.

46. Categories of class and race are inseparable in this period, given that as immigrants were generally lower class and so were a target for the eugenicists’ concerns over differential birth rates and degeneracy stemming from the proletariat.

47. Some considered that inter-racial breeding might benefit mankind in general: ‘The lot of the whole human race might be improved if inferior races were gradually enlightened and elevated, bringing them into contact with the ideas and institutions of a higher civilisation.’ (Henry Fawcett, 1865, cited in Harris, p.234) While this displays an atypically liberal attitude to immigration, it also demonstrates the deeply entrenched assumptions of innate superiority in Victorian Britain.

48. Harris, p.6.

49. H.G. Wells’ comment on Galton’s paper, 1904.

50. Parrinder, p.98.

51. Parrinder, p.97.

52. In contrast, Shaw was far more open-minded regarding notions of racial hierarchy and moral superiority over other races. In his letter to The Times of 1907 he challenges the assumption that ‘the test of morality is simply conformity to English custom’, instead suggesting that the fate of the race might be improved by the adoption of polygamous customs which his contemporaries find so morally abhorrent.

53. Oxford English Dictionary (2000).

54. Wells, Anticipations, p.218.

55. This is not the case in other fictional works of the period, for example Conan Doyle’s The Lost World of 1912, where the protagonist refers to the Cucama Indians he encounters as ‘an amiable, but degraded race’. Pick, p.157.

56. Levy and Peart.

57. Immigrants to the US, particularly of Eastern and Southern European origin, were perceived as mentally degenerate (based on their performance in culturally-loaded Army intelligence tests) and possessing of a prolific fecundity; leading to widespread concern that continued immigration presented (in the words of Robert Yerkes) ‘a menace of race deterioration’. Kevles, p.94.

58. Stone, p.94.

59. Kevles, p.98.

60. Stone, p.97.

61. McLaren, p.152.

62. Kevles, p.98.

63. This argument is expressed fully in Daniel Stone’s Breeding Superman (2002).

64. This claim was made in their 1935 publication, We Europeans: A Survey of 'Racial’ Problems. Kevles, p.133.

65. McLaren, p.190.

66. Kevles, p.198.

67. Stone, p.111.

68. See page ??? for discussion.

69. Thomas Carlyle castigated ruling-class failure, but for the Time Traveller notions of moral responsibility and blame are no refuge – he is implicated in the Eloi’s ‘degradation and fear’ by virtue of his shared humanity. See Pick, p.159.

70. MacKenzie, p.125.

71. The Science of Life, p.426.

72. Anticipations, p.246.

73. A.B. Walkley, cited in Evans, p.111.

74. Walkley condemned Shaw’s plays as the work of a ‘a man who is no dramatist at all’. Evans, p.111.

75. Shaw refers to the concerns of degeneration and to the dangers of Democracy, which he fears, without a population capable of using it wisely, will lead to ‘ruin’ [p.25].

76. This also refers to the removal of selective pressures through the action of social reform, thereby eliminating the effect of Nature yet providing nothing in its place.

77. In his comment on Galton’s Paper, 1904, Shaw urged for the improvement of ‘such a deplorable piece of work as man’.

78. Chesterton himself rejoiced in what he saw as ‘the old unaltered, fighting, beer-drinking, creed-making, child-loving, affectionate, selfish, unreasonable, respectable man’, and despaired of Shaw’s insistence on treating man as ‘a rational object of service’ which should be manipulated and improved upon. Evans, p.101.

79. The potential for eugenic policy to take precedence at the expense of humanity was realised in the infamous and chilling human experiments of the Nazi regime during WWII.

80. Walkley accused Shaw of letting ‘the quintessential drama go hang’ in preference of a demonstration of his opinions. Evans, p.110.

81. Evans, p.117.

82. Evans, p.105.

83. See page 24 for a discussion of Shaw’s letter to The Times.

84. However, his views still attracted notoriety due to their extremism. Johnson supported his assertions of the need to revolutionise marriage norms: ‘some polygamous device must be resorted to in order to utilize fully the men of best type as fathers’, but regretted that the notoriety such suggestions attracted made it impossible to evaluate their potential objectively. Johnson, p.53.

85. On the basis of this evidence I will refer directly to the opinions expressed as being those of Shaw himself throughout my discussion of the play and the appendix.

86. His infamous lecture to the Eugenics Education Society in 1910 resulted in widespread ridicule of the Society by the press as advocates of ‘free love’. Stone, p.127.

87. Valency, p.215.

88. Peters, Introduction.

89. Valency, p.215.

90. Ibid, p.201.

91. Schopenhauer, cited in Valency, p.215.

92. Ibid, p.218.

93. This influence may have been indirect, as there is no conclusive evidence that Shaw ever read Das Welt, although he refers to it in the preface to Man and Superman [p.32], and the ideas it contained were prevalent in Britain after its translation to English in the 1850s.

94. Schopenhauer is most famous for expounding a philosophy of unerring pessimism, and his conception of the world of Will as one of relentless suffering and pain is partly entrenched in his interest in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy (he was strongly influenced by the Buddhist mantra ‘all life is suffering’), while also having some likely origin in a psychological predisposition to negativity. For Schopenhauer, the Will is the source of all suffering, since willing never brings contentment, but only further desire. Art, being ‘will-less perception’, offers a temporary respite from the otherwise relentless march of the Will, but the only true peace is to be found in the complete cessation of existence – death.

95. Audi, pp.613-7.

96. Gane, p.83.

97. Shaw emphasizes the enduring nature of the idea of race improvement: ‘The cry for the Superman did not begin with Nietzsche, nor will it end with his vogue’ [p.216].

98. Shaw acknowledges this directly in Man and Superman, referring to ‘that German Polish madman…it was he who raked up the Superman, who is as old as Prometheus.’[p.172]

99. Stone, p.7.

100. Ibid., p.64.

101. From Mugge, ‘Eugenics and the Superman’, Eugenics Review, 1909. Cited in Stone, p.62.

102. Stone, p.78.

103. Roebuck Ramsden [p.45].

104. Tanner threatens to sell his and Ann’s wedding gifts in order to finance the free circulation of copies of the Revolutionist’s Handbook, a threat which is deliberately provocative in its intentions, but which serves to instate Tanner’s book as the last, and enduring, image of the play [p.208].

105. Kevles, p.3.

106. In The Revolutionist’s Handbook Shaw advocates the ‘dissolution of the present necessary association of marriage with conjugation’, therefore providing the source for Ramsden’s outrage.

107. Shaw explored this notion of ‘eugenic experiment’ again in his play of 1934, The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isle, in the form of a three-way marriage, which evokes the theme of sexual reconstruction.

108. John Humphrey Noyes founded the Perfectionist Oneida Community, New York, on the conviction that monogamy discriminated ‘against the best and in favour of the worst; for while the good man will be limited by his conscience to what the law allows, the bad man, free from moral check, will distribute his seed beyond the legal limits’. In 1869 he extended the existing scheme of ‘complex marriage’ to a voluntary program of selective breeding. Kevles, p.21.

109. Shaw claims that the experiments produced ‘healthier children…and suffered less evil than any Joint Stock Company on record’ [p.223].

110. ‘The bubble of heredity has been pricked: the certainty that acquirements are negligible as elements in practical heredity has demolished the hopes of the educationists’ [pp.24-5].

111. Shaw emphasizes the social barriers to marriage in the pairing of Violet and Hector, who are forced to keep their marriage a secret for fear of their respective families’ disapproval on the grounds of social status and expectation – ‘If you were to marry the son of an English manufacturer of office furniture, your friends would consider it a misalliance…[and] my silly old dad…would shew me the door for marrying the most perfect lady in England merely because she has no handle to her name’ [p.104].

112. ‘The Life Force respects marriage only because marriage is a contrivance of its own to secure the greatest number of children’ [p.156].

113. McLaren, p.186.

114. Dated 5th Oct. 1907; Francis Galton Papers, Shaw File, UCL.

115. Wells’ Utopias restrict women to a maternal role: ‘love [your children], serve them, and through them, the state, and you will serve yourself’. Quotation from New Worlds for Old (1913), cited in McLaren, p.193.

116. Galton joined the anti-suffrage movement, see D W Forrest, Francis Galton: the Life and Work of a Victorian Genius (1974) p. 227

117. See Kevles, p.24.

118. McLaren, p.191.

119. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, p.202.

120. Wells considered that ‘there is nothing in the mind of the average man except blank indifference’, Anticipations, p.80.

121. In a letter to Pearson, Shaw criticised his personality at length, concluding that there were ‘a great many reasons for my disliking you, despising you, refusing to know such a fellow or to waste my valuable time in writing to him…in spite of the reasons, I accept with enjoyment that I am always glad to hear from you.’ 29th Nov. 1892. Karl Pearson Papers, Folder 853.

122. Shaw to Pearson, 22nd Oct. 1901. Karl Pearson Papers.

123. Pearson, cited in Kevles, p.35.

124. Shaw’s comment on Galton’s paper, 1904.

125. Shaw’s extreme emphasis on heredity attracted censure from his contemporaries. Johnson, while he supported the need to revolutionise marriage, criticised Shaw for neglecting the importance of ‘the social institution of the family’, arguing that social and well as biological factors are essential for the production of offspring of ‘quality’. Johnson, p.53.

126. Shaw on Galton, 1904.

127. ‘Our analysis of human faculties is entirely inadequate for the purpose of tracing hereditary influence’. Wells’ comment on Galton’s Paper, 1904.

128. ‘Dr Galton’s inquiries have always seemed to me to ignore the consideration of social advantage’, Wells’ comment on Galton’s Paper, 1904.

129. ‘Health, ability, manliness, and courteous disposition’, Galton’s address, 1904.

130. ‘Are there not types of health?’ Wells on Galton, 1904.

131. Galton, 1904.

132. The Eugenics Society based their notions of heredity on the use of pedigrees without reference to a specific theory of the mechanism of inheritance. This was in contrast with America, where pedigrees were used to claim that traits were inherited as Mendelian ‘unit characters’. Mazumdar, p.4.

133. Wells on Galton’s paper.

134. A Modern Utopia (1905), p.80.

135. The Science of Life, p.968.

136. New York Times, 23rd Oct. 1933.

137. Stone, p.127.

138. Although some of the media recognised his tongue-in-cheek tone as typical of the infamous Shavian extremism. Stone, p.128.

139. ‘It is always necessary to overstate a case startlingly to make people sit up and listen to it…I do this myself habitually and deliberately.’ Valency, p.15.

140. Valency, p.9.

141. Pearson referred affectionately to his friend’s eccentricity: ‘It is nice sometimes to thrust irritating truths on to B.S. as he does on the rest of the world as a whole.’ Pearson to Shaw, July 3rd 1911. Karl Pearson Papers, folder 928/4.

142. Stone, p.130.

143. New York Times, 1933.

144. Ellis, p.67