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BEASTLY JOURNEYS

Travel and Transformation

at the fin de siècle

TIM YOUNGS

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
First published 2013 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool
L69 7ZU

Copyright © 2013 Tim Youngs

The right of Tim Youngs to be identified as the author of this book has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

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Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
For

John and Pauline Lucas
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# Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction: The Unchaining of the Beast 1

1 City Creatures 39

2 The Bat and the Beetle 74

3 Morlocks, Martians, and Beast-People 107

4 ‘Beast and man so mixty’: The Fairy Tales of George MacDonald 140

5 Oscar Wilde: ‘an unclean beast’ 165

Conclusion 197

Bibliography 211

Index 220
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Acknowledgements

This book has had a long gestation. Early stages of it were supported
through research leave funded by the Arts and Humanities Research
Board and through my own university department's sabbatical
programme. I am grateful to both bodies. The following people have also
helped through, variously, their provision of ideas, information, encour-
agement, and the hosting of lectures, seminars, and conferences at which
early drafts of some material were tried out: Chris Barker, Dinah Birch,
Joseph Bristow, Antoinette Burton, Viv Chadder, Stephen Donovan,
Justin D. Edwards, R. J. (Dick) Ellis, Charles Forsdick, Shirley Foster,
Christopher Gair, Indira Ghose, Mike Green, Lynne Hapgood, Tracey
Hill, Peter Hulme, Philip Leonard, John Lucas, Roger Luckhurst, Gesa
Mackenthun, Richard Pearson, Lyssa Randolph, Ray Russell, Wim
Tigges, Richard White, Martin Willis, and David Woods. My thanks
go also to the inter-library loans team at Nottingham Trent University.
I am especially grateful to Anthony Cond for encouraging submission
of the book to Liverpool University Press and for his patience and good
humour in seeing it through to publication. Any weaknesses, oddities,
and errors are my own.

Portions of Chapter One and Chapter Three have their origins in three
earlier essays, whose ideas they develop: ‘Stevenson’s Monkey-Business: *The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde*’, in Peter Liebregts and
Wim Tigges, eds, *Beauty and the Beast: Christina Rossetti, Walter Pater, R. L. Stevenson and their Contemporaries* (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996),
pp.157–170; ‘Wells’s Fifth Dimension: *The Time Machine* at the Fin de Siècle’, in Tracey Hill and Alan Marshall, eds, *Decadence and Danger: Writing, History and the Fin de Siècle* (Bath: Sulis Press, 1997), pp.64–74;
and ‘The Plasticity of Living Forms: Beasts and Narrative in *The Octopus* and *The Island of Doctor Moreau*’, *Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations* 1, 1 (April 1997), 86–103. I am grateful to Rodopi,
Tracey Hill, and Christopher Gair respectively for allowing me to draw
on this nascent material. For permission to quote from H. G. Wells's
works I am grateful to A. P. Watt.

As ever, the greater and lasting acknowledgement is to Gurminder and
Natty for being who they are.
# Introduction

## The Unchaining of the Beast

### Vile bestiality

In 1936, Georg Lukács wrote of the 'degradation and crippling under capitalism [that] is far more tragic, its *bestiality viler*, more ferocious and terrible than that pictured even in the best of these novels'. He was referring to modern realism, which, in his view, had 'lost its capacity to depict the dynamics of life, and thus its representation of capitalist reality is inadequate, diluted and constrained'.¹ The present study grapples with this vile bestiality, but examines its earlier manifestation in British texts between 1885 and 1900 – the period that saw the development of realism and its sister movement, naturalism, and which is most commonly described in literary and cultural studies as an 'age of transition'.²

During these years, '[t]he Late Victorians themselves were intensely conscious of their transitory state'.³ The literary historian Peter Keating outlines, for example, the transformation of education into a system of social mobility; cultural transformation; the transformation, 'even perhaps the death', of the Victorian family; and a 'revolutionary transformation in every aspect of communications'.⁴ To these, we might add urbanisation, whose 'whetted fangs of change/Daily devour the old demesne'.⁵ John Davidson's lines growl with the sense of class menace.

The changes that many experienced in late nineteenth-century Britain are symbolised by the obsessive display of figures of indeterminate or altered shape: beasts with human characteristics; humans who are, or who become, beastly; creatures of dubious or shifting classification. Some of these have been the subject of considerable critical attention, but rather than timeless mythical or psychological examples of metamorphosis – for which they are often taken – these physical alterations might be viewed more productively as reflections of changes to the social body.⁶
In ‘one of the most important documents of the fin de siècle’, Max Nordau considers the notion behind the latter term:

> It means a practical emancipation from traditional discipline, which theoretically is still in force. To the voluptuary this means unbridled lewdness, the unchaining of the beast in man; to the withered heart of the egoist, disdain of all consideration for his fellow-men, the trampling under foot of all barriers which enclose brutal greed of lucre and lust of pleasure ... And to all, it means the end of an established order, which for thousands of years has satisfied logic, fettered depravity, and in every art matured something of beauty.⁷

Nordau’s condemnation of the fin de siècle connects avarice, animality, and disorder – a linkage that the present study explores.

If the following pages risk assuming the character of a safari, the metaphors of animality and movement that they track provide an important vantage point from which to survey the literary and social terrain of the 1880s and 1890s. When, for instance, a modern editor of Walter Besant’s *All Sorts and Conditions of Men* (1882) summarises that novel as one ‘about transformation: crossings of class boundaries, metamorphoses of estate’,⁸ she is describing a situation that also applies to its context. Besant himself turns to animal imagery to make his point, writing:

> There is one consolation always open, thank Heaven, for the meanest among us *poor worms of earth*. We are gifted with imaginations; we can make the impossible an actual fact, and can with the eye of the mind make the unreal stand before us in the flesh. Therefore when we are down-trodden, we may proceed ... to take revenge upon our enemy in imagination.⁹

The immediate referent here is the vengeance pictured by the grasping, cheating Mr Bunker upon the heiress, Angela Messenger, who, in visiting her property and its East End environs incognito as Miss Kennedy, has humiliated him. In a broader sense, however, the passage glances at something else that is happening: Besant uses his imagination to bust Bunker. The author’s remarks quoted above suggest the transformative power of imaginative literature, with both negative and positive effects. While revenge is not always a motive, the metaphors employed by writers of the late nineteenth century attempt to give shape to a society in which so much had become uncertain. The threats to social definition result not only in imaginative projections of beastly confusion, but are reflected, too, in narratives of mixed generic identity.
## Surprising transformations

‘Many Victorians were fascinated by transformation and the limits of metamorphosis’, Gillian Beer observes.¹⁰ The late Victorians’ fascination with this process and its boundaries was distinctive: it followed a long tradition of interest and curiosity, but was of its own order, driven by circumstances unique to the last fifteen years or so of the nineteenth century. Each age and culture has its own monsters and transformations, often modifying those of its ancestors or neighbours. The Renaissance’s rediscovery of the classics, and their prominence in nineteenth-century élite education, tied modern European culture to the times of Ovid, who proclaimed at the beginning of his *Metamorphoses*: ‘My intention is to tell of bodies changed/To different forms.’¹¹ In a study of shape-shifting, Marina Warner recognises both the continuities and changes between the centuries. She detects in Ovid the fact that ‘metamorphosis often breaks out in moments of crisis’; that, more generally, tales of metamorphosis often occur ‘in spaces (temporal, geographical, and mental) that [are] crossroads, cross-cultural zones, points of interchange on the intricate connective tissue of communications between cultures’; and that ‘it is characteristic of metamorphic writing to appear in transitional places and at the confluences of traditions and civilizations’.¹²

It is at such a moment of ‘clash and conflict between one intellectual hegemony and another’ that the texts of the 1880s and 1890s examined here are situated. Wim Neetens has described how, in the 1880s, ‘an already precarious and internally eroded ideological dominant found itself faced with the social unrest in which the working class and a number of progressive, middle-class intellectuals began to produce their own, decentralising and potentially counter-hegemonic discourses’. Through its increased literary and scientific interest in the working class, the British bourgeoisie attempted to reassert its dominance and hegemony. ‘Under these ideological and cultural pressures, naturalism was foregrounded in English literature as the artistic practice which carried the literature of working-class life to an extreme of colonial self-confidence.’¹³ One might also refer to the significance of ‘racial’ encounter at this time of increased immigration into London and of heightened anxiety towards the figure of the ‘mulatto’. Metamorphoses may be connected across the centuries, but the nature of the crises and contacts differs from case to case and from place to place.¹⁴ In Warner’s words, ‘context changes meanings’.¹⁵

Warner extends the idea of metamorphosis by claiming that through
its communication of ‘principles and ideas’, it ‘transformed their receivers and readers’.¹⁶ It does this partly because

[t]ransformations bring about a surprise ... The breaking of rules of natural law and verisimilitude creates the fictional world with its own laws ... Moreover, some kinds of metamorphosis play a crucial part in anagnorisis, or recognition, the reversal fundamental to narrative form, and so govern narrative satisfaction.¹⁷

Such a process can be seen to operate in the texts that form the subject of *Beastly Journeys*. Since the social and cultural changes that were happening at the time are reflected symbolically in the alteration of shape that humans and (other) animals undergo, the shock of physical disruption may, if we pursue Warner's argument, be said to force recognition of the new social juxtapositions. In fact, while this might have been the case for some contemporary readers, who cannot fail to have seen the economic basis of the literary transformations, the recognition that Warner describes seems largely to have been overlooked or misapprehended by subsequent readers. The further changes that these late nineteenth-century tales of transformation have undergone in film, stage, and prose adaptations have diluted their radical force. The social and economic anxieties of the original texts have generally vanished. Dracula, Mr Hyde, Dorian Gray, the Martians and the Morlocks are not what they once were. *Beastly Journeys* is, in part, a journey backwards to (re)discover their former identities and situations.

The last couple of decades of the nineteenth century seem to have housed an especially remarkable menagerie. Apes (white, as well as black),¹⁸ wolves, bats, beetles, hyenas, alien beings, and countless others swing, prowl, fly, creep, crawl, and slither along. Many are still gawped at uneasily. These are the years of the Beast-People, the Ripper, the ‘Elephant Man’, and others. There were overtly political beasts, too: ‘Some of the political implications of Nietzsche’s views were taken up by Shaw and Wells; references to the *Übermensch*, “Superman”, or “blond beast” occur with some frequency from the mid-1890s; and there were real enthusiasts, like John Davidson.’¹⁹

They are remarkable both in their number and in their transmutation from or into other forms. One can say of them, as one critic has of metamorphosis generally and its literary representations in particular, that ‘it is obvious ... metamorphosis has something to do with the search for identity, or in some cases its antithesis, the refusal to develop’.²⁰ The condition of the creatures rounded up in this book is symptomatic of the society that has spawned them. For an understanding of them,
we must add to the six broad headings of metamorphosis that Irving Massey proposes – scientific, philosophical, anthropological (including lycanthropy and vampirism), religious, psychological, and aesthetic²¹ – a seventh: economic. It is the economic and social changes of the late nineteenth century that drive the shape-shifting of these years and the science of Darwinism that frames it.

Three aspects to these beasts underlie the present study. First, many of these creatures are avatars of humans, their transformation from their original condition due to the deforming effects of capital. And yet, second, the socio-economic environment that has so shaped these ghastly apparitions has disappeared from most retellings and readings of the original narratives. Third, the motif of travel forms an important part of the texts, effecting the alteration itself or leading to the discovery of that transformation. Both the mode of travel and the discoveries that are made throw light on the preoccupations of the period.

## Framing the changes: beastly journeys

This will be a book about the fin de siècle, but I shall try to resist easy generalisations about the character of those years. Max Nordau objected to the idea of classifying parts of a century as though it were a ‘kind of living being, born like a beast or a man, passing through all the stages of existence ... to die with the expiration of the hundredth year, after being afflicted in its last decade with all the infirmities of mournful senility’.²² One can make a case for any period being a ‘time of’ something to someone. In doing so, one will dangerously overlook the counter-examples and anomalies that do not fit the general pattern. As Simon Dentith, denying the possibility of speaking of ‘a *Zeitgeist* for the nineteenth century, or any portion of it, such as the “Victorian Age”’, states: ‘every period of history is characterised by multiple and contradictory ways of thinking, seeing and feeling’.²³ And as a critic of 1890s decadence has pointed out, plenty of people lived through the decade untouched by the reference point we give it. On the other hand, as the same critic has remarked, ‘[t]he origins of the nineties myth lie within the period itself’.²⁴ Generalisations are finally inescapable, and perhaps all that one can do is to treat them with caution. To claim that the end of the century was a time of nervous introspection, marked by anxiety about the social changes associated with shifts in power and class relations, about gender tensions and international relations, and
precipitated by the feeling that the end of a long era was approaching, is
no doubt true, even if it tends rather too neatly to remove similar fears
from other decades and there were some in society who felt no such
insecurity. Sturgis may be right to claim that

[p]eople in the nineties were very aware of the distinctness and significance of the decade: it marked the end of the century. Side by side with the enthusiasm for the 'new' was a consciousness of the 'end'.²⁵

But that is not to say that anxieties about change did not exist at other
times. Nevertheless, the worries at the end of the nineteenth century
have to do with uncertainties about identity. They are generated by
many factors, including class mobility and conflict, sexual confusion,
international competition and threats, loss of confidence in the ability to
control one's environment, and a fear of being overtaken by latent urges.
All of these owe their force and character to the social and intellectual
contexts in which they occur. In particular, much of the imagery and
the impetus for its expression are provided by Darwinian and psycho-
analytic metaphors, and this imagery, too, must be historicised. Of
course, Darwin's 'daring and momentous conviction that species were
mutable' supplied both reason and image for much of this concern,²⁶ as
we shall see below, but — as with Freud's ideas later — it is doubtful that
the impact of Darwin's writings would have been so great had they not
spoken to other contemporary fears. In Adam Phillips's words:

> The new Darwinian or Freudian person – born and growing up in the newfound flourish and terror of a mercilessly expansive capitalism – had to be committed to instability. It was, unsurprisingly, economies of loss, in their secular versions, that preoccupied Darwin and Freud.²⁷

Both Darwinism and psychoanalysis depend also on ideas and
metaphors of travel (evolution, reversion, and interior). The language
in which these are communicated reflects the intellectual and social
structures – and subsequent responses to them – that characterise the
age. Outward and inward change preoccupies Darwin, Freud, and their
contemporaries. Motifs of travel and animality predominate. Focusing
on the presence of these in popular texts of the late nineteenth century
allows us to recover the context and force of elements whose significance
has often been underplayed in readings that concentrate on their
generic qualities (science fiction, gothic, horror, and so on). The shape-
shifting that is discussed in this study invariably happens within, or
itself constitutes, some kind of journey. Travel functions as a structural
metaphor within the literature: for example, the time travel of H. G.
Wells's *The Time Machine* (1895), the space travel that brings the Martians to London in the same author's *The War of the Worlds* (1898), the journey to the island on which are practised the ghastly experiments in *The Island of Doctor Moreau* (1896), again by Wells, and the journeys that precipitate the 'reverse colonization' of Bram Stoker's *Dracula* (1897) and Richard Marsh's *The Beetle* (1897).²⁸ More obliquely, perhaps, Jekyll's experiments in Robert Louis Stevenson's *The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde* (1888) can be interpreted as a psychological voyage into his unconscious (a not uncommon reading) or a social exploration of class differences in which the most frightening aspect is not Jekyll's turning into Hyde, but rather the latter's standing to inherit Jekyll's fortune of a quarter of a million pounds;²⁹ while the urban exploration of General Booth's *In Darkest England* (1890) consciously reverses the journey undertaken by Stanley in his *In Darkest Africa* (1890),³⁰ though its author seems unaware that Stanley himself, when writing about Africa, was reflecting on Britain. In all of these texts and many more, bestiality is present as a signifier of travel, as subsequent chapters will show.

Travel is especially important as a motif in the mid- to late nineteenth century, in view of what Raymond Williams has called the 'crisis of the knowable community',³¹ which occurred with the transition from a predominantly rural to a mainly urban society and led authors to explore the new conditions and relationships of existence through a development of the novel form. Williams praises Dickens for the skill and curiosity with which he charts relationships, frequently between people who seem at first to have no connection to one another.³² This concern provided the impetus for many of the 'condition of England' novels from the mid-century onward. One thinks, for instance, of Elizabeth Gaskell's description of the Davenports' cellar contrasted with the opulence of the factory owner Carson's home in *Mary Barton* (1848). For the later novelists this preoccupation continues, but it is often presented as a need to establish links between the surface and subterranean, preserving in its verticality the idea of a hierarchy, even as the security of those on top was threatened by the return of the socially and psychologically repressed. But at the close of the century, when Darwinism had taken root (*The Origin of Species* first appeared in 1859) and psychoanalysis was in its infancy, the poles of civilisation and savagery acquired a personal, psychological basis in addition to the familiar aspect of social investigation. The theme of duality, which had been used forcefully to convey the sense of a divided society, became more self-centred as evolutionary and degeneration theories combined with growing attention paid to the
unconscious with the result that the emphasis fell on a split personal subject.

Travel offers a means of discovering, exploring, and connecting such divides. Wells's *The Time Machine*, which readily lends itself to social and psychoanalytic criticism, uses time travel as a device through which the relationship of the underground dwellers to those above ground can be examined, with the Time Traveller continually modifying his understanding of what he sees. In its very title, George Gissing's *The Nether World* (1889) symbolises the image of the socially subterranean (as, of course, does the label: the 'underclass'). Hardy's *Jude the Obscure* (1895) – not a focus of this volume, but worth noting here – charts the tragic journey of one of many hidden from view. In the chapters that follow, we shall encounter social exploration, time travel, space travel, interior voyages, sexual adventures, journeys to and from colonies, subterranean burrowing, and forays into fairyland.

The line between fictional and non-fictional treatments of social journeys is not always easy to find. In his introduction to an anthology of some of the important works of social exploration from the second half of the nineteenth century, Peter Keating argues that they are 'more a frame of mind than a literary form', and that the role of social explorer is assumed by novelists and characters as much as by figures like Mayhew.³³ There does seem to be a shared use of metaphor, structure, and rhetoric, but these need to be examined in their own particular contexts, otherwise this gives the false impression that these all originate in social exploration and spread beyond it. Rather, the language and typologies of social exploration are influenced by expressions and developments in other arenas. Indeed, without elaborating on it, Keating himself points to one of these: external travel, especially in the imperial sphere. In the literature of social exploration, Keating notes the 'constant references to "wandering tribes", "pygmies", and "rain forests"', but he comments simply that these descriptions are used to make the social explorer sound as adventurous and hardy as his counterpart overseas.³⁴ There is much more to it than this. The terminology applied to non-white 'races' and to the working- or under-classes is often interchangeable, as several commentators have noticed.³⁵ So it is at once true and yet not enough to write, as Keating does, that

[t]he upsurge of interest in the East End of London during the 1880s and 1890s had at hand a ready-made contrast between East and West which could be used to refer simultaneously to both London and the Empire, and this
became so popular that it led to what can almost be considered a sub-genre
of exploration literature.³⁶

This makes the process sound too automatic. Further, while Keating
rightly claims that the imagery of exploration was 'clearly as important
to the romance as to the realistic novel and social documentary' and
operated on a metaphorical and literal level, I think he is wrong to
assert that its emphasis is 'totally different'. According to Keating, the
'realist, the journalist and the sociologist ... draw the reader's attention
to neglected areas of contemporary life', but the writer of romance
'employed the same imagery in order to escape from the present, or, if he
had a point to make of direct contemporary relevance, to set up a process
of extrapolation that the reader was expected to follow through'.³⁷ In
fact, as I hope my discussion of Wells, Wilde, and MacDonald will make
clear, the writers of romance and other forms of fiction were concerned
just as directly with those present conditions. They were not escaping,
but offering vantage points from which those neglected areas could be
seen more clearly, from a different perspective.

Elaine Showalter has observed that: 'The ends of centuries seem
not only to suggest but to intensify crises.'³⁸ Given this fact and the
perception of critical states it is not surprising that the fin de siècle
should be so rich in the types and number of textual travels: characters
must journey between conditions if crisis is to be registered, let alone
resolved.³⁹ Showalter goes on to comment that: 'In periods of cultural
insecurity, when there are fears of regression and degeneration, the
longing for strict border controls around the definition of gender, as
well as race, class, and nationality, becomes especially intense.'⁴⁰ The
conservative longing for inviolable demarcation zones is only one side
of the story, for it depends upon the desire to transgress, and this desire
may exist overtly in others or latently in oneself. Whichever applies, the
metaphor of travel provides a way through, be it by passport or illegal
entry. Like metamorphosis, 'itself a process of exchange in which "body"
connects the two forms',⁴¹ travel also affords the perfect opportunity to
consider two or more states at once, even if this is not the acknowledged
aim. Beastly travels permit the metaphoric contemplation of migration,
naturalisation, and transformation.
## Metaphors, money, and Marx

Since I wish to view these processes not as unchanging psychic tendencies, but as historically inflected, an outline of some of the events from 1885 to 1900, suggesting their significance for fictional travels, should now be provided, together with statements on the role of money in effecting change.

‘Until the 1870s’, writes David Cannadine, ‘there was an exceptionally high correlation between wealth, status, and power, for the simple reason that they were all territorially determined and defined.’⁴² In the literature that I shall be examining, the collapse of this correlation and the loss of this definition are expressed by gaps between appearance and meaning and by a confusion of shapes and places. It is especially apt, then, that Cannadine should describe his historical survey of the aristocracy’s decline as ‘this *monstrous* and overbearing enterprise’,⁴³ for the social and political changes that he records are very often reflected in representations of monstrosity. This process is not, of course, unique to the period. But the details of what it reflects are. Tracing the etymology of the word ‘monster’, Marina Warner writes that it ‘*resonates with the word for “to show” monstrare, influenced by* monere ‘*to warn*’, *thus implying a portent, a warning*’.⁴⁴ What it is that is shown and warned about will vary from one time to another.

Observing that '[a]s the last quarter of the nineteenth century opened, the traditional, titled, landowners were still the richest, the most powerful and the most well-born people in the country',⁴⁵ Cannadine calculates that in 1880 more than 60 per cent of the land of the British Isles was owned by fewer than 11,000 people who held estates of over a thousand acres.⁴⁶ From 1875 and over the next seventy years, British landowners suffered a loss of economic and political control. The new fortunes that were made during the rapid rise of the international plutocracy, notably in the United States, were, for example, in business and industry, not from agricultural land; they were, in other words, ‘in more liquid form’⁴⁷ – a term that suitably conveys the fluidity of the social order.

Karl Marx wrote of ‘the change in form or the metamorphosis of commodities through which the social metabolism is mediated’.⁴⁸ He used this image to describe the process by which labour transforms itself into a product, which then becomes a commodity when it is exchanged for money. At this stage, the opposite forms of the commodity as use-value and exchange-value confront each other. ‘These antagonistic forms of the commodities’, stated Marx, ‘are the real forms of motion of
the process of exchange' (p.229). A further transformation occurs when the money that is handed over for a commodity is itself exchanged for a commodity. This transaction also results in a change of role for the original seller of the commodity, who now becomes a buyer. Indeed, as Marx pointed out, '[b]eing a seller and being a buyer are therefore not fixed roles, but constantly attach themselves to different persons in the course of the circulation of commodities' (p.206). Additionally, Marx wrote of the 'personification of things and the reification of persons' in modern society (p.1054).⁴⁹

Whether Marx's account simply employs a metaphor or whether capitalism has, in fact, naturalised the processes he describes to such an extent that we have lost sight of transformations that actually underpin the economy may be debatable. What seems surer is that metamorphosis helps us to understand what is involved in the ownership and transfer of property. According to Marx, if exchange is to occur at all, then 'a change of form [in the commodity] must always occur'. Change is inherent in the process: 'the conversion of a commodity into money is the conversion of money into a commodity' (p.203). These dynamics of exchange ensure that transaction always involves transformation. They also involve motion. If this is the normal way of things in capitalist societies, then it is easy to see how moments of economic and social crisis will generate intense and worried attention to both the metamorphosis and the movement. A particular focus is likely to be money and the relationship of people to it; not just because money may be lost or gained at such times, but because so much is invested in it. It is 'all other commodities divested of their shape, the product of their universal alienation'. It is 'the absolutely alienable commodity' (p.205). Neither the commodity nor the role of its producer or seller is fixed. Indeed, Marx assumes that the 'complete metamorphosis of a commodity, in its simplest form, implies four *dénouements* and three *dramatis personae***' (p.206). Transformation thus seems intrinsic to a description of the economy, whether that term is meant metaphorically or literally.

Marx's views have, of course, been widely criticised. Yet, in an essay that outlines the opposing ideas of Marx and Adam Smith and that notes the 'very large number of intermediate positions' held by those such as Georg Simmel, two of Marx's latter-day critics, Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch, write that: 'what all these different strands in our cultural tradition appear to agree about is that – whether for good or ill – money acts as an incredibly powerful agent of profound social and cultural transformations'.⁵⁰ Parry and Bloch argue that the role of money as an
agent has been exaggerated. They doubt that it has the intrinsic power
often ascribed to it. There is not, they claim, such a gulf between the
significance of money in capitalist and pre-capitalist societies or between
monetary and non-monetary economies as is usually assumed. Marx's
writings, they imply, are marred by a mistaken assumption of universal
rules and features. Instead '[n]ot only does money mean different things
in different cultures, but ... it may mean different things within the
same culture' (p.22). Whether or not one accepts Parry and Bloch's
thesis, their proposition is testament to the power and pervasiveness
of the idea they are countering: money as a force for transformations.
Even they see money not as having any 'fixed and immutable meaning'
(p.22), but as having its meaning 'situationally defined' and 'constantly
re-negotiated' (p.23).

The perception of a connection between money (or property) and
transformation is strong. Late nineteenth-century images of bestiality
both link to enduring concerns and are culturally and historically
specific. Before proceeding to discuss intellectual influences on the
shape of beasts of the 1880s and 1890s, I shall first consider economic,
political, and social factors, for 'in the Victorian age money is a potent
source of cultural anxiety' and '[o]f the enormous corpus of Victorian
fiction, there is barely a single novel whose contents remain untouched by
money'. Money has been described as 'the text beneath the text', exerting
such power that 'from *Our Mutual Friend* to Capital ... it even seems
to possess a will of its own, accomplishing changes in the social world
without human agency'.⁵¹ A theme throughout *Beastly Journeys* will be
the growing sense of alarm at a widening disjunction between moral,
social, and financial worth; an apprehension of a mismatch between
where and what one is and where and what one should be. Simon James
is right to point out that novelists such as Dickens, Gaskell, Gissing,
and Wells 'were concerned that existing structures of social relations
were failing to adapt to the rapidly changing nature of their economic
base, that economic value and social or moral value could not coincide'.
James makes an interesting point, too, about the effect of this on literary
style, observing that 'money remains the site where realism and romance
frequently compete'.⁵² We shall bear this in mind when we look at
transforming genres. Here it is sufficient to note that this was a period
in which the emergence of literary forms that we now take for granted
was a response to the economic conditions of the time.

Keating notices the development of the short story, first in the United
States and then in Britain, but perhaps pays insufficient regard to the
material reasons for its rise, which was rooted in the production of the literary magazines and journals of the US.⁵³ He does, however, remark on the proliferation of literary forms, many of them admixtures and transformations of related genres, during these years. Thus, for example, ‘Wells’s short stories and romances drew indiscriminately on elements of horror, supernatural, psychological, fantastic and adventure fiction.’⁵⁴

Keating also observes that certain narrative journeys into the past, such as Haggard's *She* (1887), besides those into the future, bear a kinship with science fiction, as do Kipling's experiments with non-realistic literary forms, including those tales such as '007' and 'Wireless', in which his interest in technology showed itself to be anthropomorphic. There was also the birth and spread of the invasion novel, on which both Kipling and Wells drew.⁵⁵ Genres were transforming, along with the social conditions that stimulated them. Neetens notices that '[o]f the 1880 Victorian novels of working-class life listed by Keating, over two thirds were published between 1880 and 1900'.⁵⁶

These conditions affected authors directly. Published writing is property, too; professional authors write for money. The Society of Authors was founded, on Walter Besant's initiative, in 1883 and, among other causes, campaigned for the acceptance in the US of a copyright act.⁵⁷ Authors are labourers, as Keating reminds us:

> In urging that authors should unite to oppose the unfair practices of publishers, the Society of Authors was at one with the wider changes in the 1880s and 1890s that saw the growth of trade unionism ... No less than the dockworkers and matchgirls, authors were being urged to gain strength for a battle against their 'employers', the publishers and editors ... Enemies of the Society were eager to point out, and rightly so, that if it succeeded it would be, in all but name, a trade union.⁵⁸

These years also gave birth to the professional literary agent, one of the first of whom – A. P. Watt – acted for Wells and also on behalf of George MacDonald (the latter the subject of Chapter Four of this book).⁵⁹

## Lost property

Since '[p]ossession of property ... was portrayed in novels of the fin de siècle as a potent source of social and psychological disorder',⁶⁰ it seems important to look at what was happening to property and its possession. In particular, the focus of what follows will be on London – that 'strangely mingled monster',⁶¹ as Henry James called it. Political and
literary discourse of the late nineteenth century is saturated with changes of shape.⁶² The metaphors used by historians a century later to describe the consequences of these material shifts repeat the imagery then current. Property ‘was a cluster of complex and chameleon-like ideas’, and there was ‘a metamorphosis in the part played by property in political conflict’, wrote one historian in 1993.⁶³ It might fairly be objected that this proves nothing beyond a similarity in the figures of speech used both then and now to communicate what was happening in society at the end of the nineteenth century, but metaphors can be particularly revealing, and this one of transformation is especially powerful and persistent.

According to Cannadine, it is from the 1880s onwards that the ‘circumstances and consciousness [of the patricians] changed and weakened’. Cannadine attributes this change in large part to the ‘sudden and dramatic collapse of the agricultural base of the European economy’ and to its political and social consequences – one feature of which was the agitation that led to the extension of the franchise.⁶⁴ His view is that ‘[t]he age of the masses had superseded the age of the classes. At the same time that the economy became global, politics became democratized.’⁶⁵ If this diagnosis seems too sanguine, Cannadine does not overstate the anxieties created in the minds of the upper and middle classes by the pressure for these democratising changes. As Neville Kirk puts it: ‘the newly enfranchised masses were believed to pose a serious threat to property and to the balance of power and status’.⁶⁶ Moreover, ‘by the end of the nineteenth century Britain had become “unquestionably a working-class nation”’.⁶⁷ Harrison notes that ‘[a]lthough the middle class and aristocracy set the tone and fashion of the later nineteenth century, about 75 per cent of the population belonged to the working class’.⁶⁸ ‘In 1901 “about 85 per cent of the total working population were employed by others, and about 75 per cent as manual workers”.’⁶⁹ More than seven million people – 46 per cent of the workforce – were employed in manufacturing, mining, and building.⁷⁰

The picture we have is of an uneasy and reluctant accommodation by the old of the new. The established and threatened power evolves strategies for the containment of that which challenges it. Central to this policy is the sense of a directed mobility that is arranged in order to prevent a larger, uncontrolled movement. In the words of one historical survey of the period:

> Without some fresh influx of wealth the nobility as a class would have been hard pressed. But from the 1880s new peerages were granted to men whose fortunes had been made in trade and industry ... There was also an
increase in the number of new baronetcies and knighthoods, most of which went to businessmen and manufacturers. The top echelons of industry and commerce were thus assimilated into the ruling elite, and second and third generation brewers or millowners graduated easily via the public schools and the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford into high society.⁷¹

The passing of the 1884 to 1885 Reform Acts had increased the number of people able to vote to about five million. Most of these were working men, but these *were* men: suffrage was denied to women until 1918 and even the measures of 1884 to 1885 still left only about 28 per cent of the United Kingdom's population above the age of twenty qualified to vote.⁷² Nevertheless, the 'patrician dominance of the lower house soon vanished for ever as a result',⁷³ and

the Third Reform Act created a new and very different representational structure for the whole of Great Britain and Ireland, in which the cities and the suburbs were pre-eminent, and in which a working-class electorate possessed the dominant voice ... [T]he more representative and democratic the Commons became, the more anachronistic and unacceptable the House of Lords appeared by comparison.⁷⁴

All the same, '[t]he gap between Salisbury, the political leader of his country, and the mass of post-1884 voters whom he supposedly led, could hardly have been greater', and '[d]espite the continuing existence of an aristocratic elite most late Victorians no longer thought of themselves as living in a primarily aristocratic nation'. If there was a growing perception of a movement away from aristocratic rule, this does not mean that the middle class felt secure. It was 'far from homogeneous', and the process of accommodating new members risked leaving the door open for unwanted intruders and errant insiders.⁷⁵ Beneath the surface confidence of the middle class lay deep insecurity. The reasons for this are manifold: political, economic, intellectual, and psychological.

The class instability I have been describing coincided with challenges abroad to Britain's imperial power. Since the discourses of race and class were (and are) closely linked in any case, it is hardly surprising that they should come together at this critical period. As Neetens argues, '[b]ourgeois representations of the working class can indeed be understood as intimately linked to the properly colonial discourses produced in the service of Britain's imperial enterprise overseas.'⁷⁶ Images of the savage and primitive were applied to members of the working class and unemployed – the latter being a word that 'with reference to the surplus of casual labour in London especially, was coined in the 1880s'.⁷⁷
The extension of the franchise under the 1884 Act has been described as giving

dramatic political form to the wider cultural and social democratisation which confronted the professional classes with a deeply disturbing problem of social identity, as the boundaries between the lower bourgeoisie and their inferiors became increasingly blurred.⁷⁸

Wim Neetens’s account of this problem of social identity and blurred boundaries fits the confusion that is evident in the texts that I shall discuss in the following chapters. In these works, journeys between two types of creature or state symbolise the disturbance of borders between classes (and between genders and sexualities). Changes to the physical body reflect modifications to the social body. As these tended towards encroachment and conjunction, so the narratives of the time stressed similar perceptions of invasion, commingling, and expulsion. A cartoon from the January 1884 issue of *Punch* illustrates this nicely, with the wolf of Socialism accosting a Little Red Riding Hood figure. This is a threat not only of attack, but of ingestion: the wolf saying to himself ‘ALL THE BETTER TO EAT YOU, MY DEAR’.⁷⁹ The reworking of the famous fairy tale shows the importance of examining such images in their context, rather than taking them as timeless expressions of psychological Othering.⁸⁰ My chapter on George MacDonald’s fairy tales will explore the rootedness of his fantastic worlds in the realities of late nineteenth-century society. My reading of this material, as of many of the texts discussed in the present volume, is influenced by the work of Chris Baldick, who writes of how ‘the myth of Frankenstein registers the anxieties of the period inaugurated in the twin social and industrial revolutions in France and Britain’. Baldick concedes the necessity of psychological interpretations, but insists that ‘it is of little help to reduce the story of Frankenstein and his monster to a conflict of psychic structures if this means abstracting it from the world outside the psyche, with which the myth engages’.⁸¹ Class – ‘the central faultline of nineteenth-century life’⁸² – is crucial. Baldick notes that after the French Revolution, ‘Burke announces the birth of the monster child Democracy, while Paine records the death of the monster parent Aristocracy.’⁸³ Burke and Paine were writing almost a century before the writers considered here, but the imagery and issues survived. Lord Brabourne’s fear of the ‘devouring spirit of democracy’ was held by many of his rank, and Disraeli and Lord Salisbury saw the Liberal victory in the general election of 1880 as ‘portending a “serious war of the classes”’.⁸⁴ In the
1885 election, seventy Liberal MPs who were returned were pledged to abolish the upper house.⁸⁵

So, class conflict and social change marked this period. The 1880s 'saw the third great upsurge of trade unionism in the nineteenth century, and a new orientation of British labor'.⁸⁶ Throughout the decade, '[a]gitation for a Labour Party had been gathering strength'.⁸⁷ The Independent Labour Party was founded in 1893. Between 1888 and 1892, trade union membership had doubled to over one-and-a-half million,⁸⁸ though by the mid-1890s, 'adverse economic conditions and a fierce employer counter-attack had halved the new unionist upsurge' of these years.⁸⁹ In 1884, 80,000 people attended a meeting in Hyde Park held by the London Trades Council; a later demonstration for reform attracted 120,000. In 1885, a demonstration of the Social Democratic Foundation in Hyde Park was suppressed by the police. The demonstrators then broke windows in Pall Mall.⁹⁰ On 13 November 1887 – 'Bloody Sunday' – a meeting in Trafalgar Square to demand justice for Ireland, organised by the Federation despite police prohibition, broke up in violence. 'Violence and counter-violence continued.' In 1888, a workman was killed by the police. The Socialists held a great procession for his funeral.⁹¹ In that same year, the match girls struck. The year 1889 saw gas workers win an eight-hour day and gain a small increase in wages without having to go on strike, as well as witnessing the great dock strike in August. This latter, writes Lynd, 'ushered in the full tide of the new unionism'.⁹² In 1893, two coal miners were killed by troops at Featherstone during a bitter dispute that lasted for four months.⁹³ By the 1890s, the strike, having been deprecated even until the 1880s by union leaders and employers, 'was coming to be regarded as an indispensable means of enforcing labor demands'.⁹⁴ But these disputes were not straightforward symptoms of conflict between classes. As Lynd puts it, '[t]he dockers' strike signalized a new kind of alliance between labor and certain sections of the middle class';⁹⁵ she quotes the *Annual Register* for that year, observing that 'for quite the first time the sympathy of the middle-classes at home, and even in the Colonies, was with the men and against the masters'.⁹⁶ These labour disputes contributed to the fact that in the 1880s '[m]en became more sharply aware that institutions are man-made and, therefore, changeable'.⁹⁷ In Lynd's view, the decade

was a period of education and preparation, of accustoming people to new ways of seeing England and of interpreting relations among men ... It did not bring social revolution, but it helped to make ready the way for it.⁹⁸
The literature of the time reflects and helps facilitate those new ways of seeing. Because, in the 1880s, '[a]ccepted institutions and accepted philosophies were being sharply challenged by changes in economic conditions',⁹⁹ contemporary narratives will show those established systems under threat.

## Darwinism

The previous pages have outlined the social and economic habitats of the beasts of the 1880s and 1890s that will stalk the remaining chapters, but the shape of these creatures was formed by intellectual developments also, especially by those of Darwin, who 'himself revolutionized the concept of form'.¹⁰⁰ 'Darwin's theory of the mutability of species struck at the normative thinking that made of monsters deviations from Platonic or ideal form.'¹⁰¹ Post-Darwinian images of the beastliness of 'man' have different connotations from those that preceded them. The beasts that prowl these pages are not those of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, or Romantics,¹⁰² even if there is some continuity between them. From Darwin we see that

> the human being is no longer the prototype of ideal form in its unity, its originality, its integrity, and its perfection. Hybrid and even teratoid, as it were, in both body and mind, it contains little bits and traces of other animals ... aspects of male and female, and primitive instinctual glimmers suffused throughout its civilized behaviour.¹⁰³

Darwin's theories focused attention on diachrony: on movement through time. He made it impossible to claim finiteness or summation. As Beer observes, evolutionism is a theory 'which does *not* privilege the present, which sees it as a moving instant in an endless process of change' (*DP*, p.13). Richter puts it thus:

> The principle of evolution is dynamic: forms change and develop into other forms ... The close biological affiliation of bodies means that each organism retains the memory of its past.¹⁰⁴

Looking at beings meant looking at process:

> Any change in structure and function, which can be effected by small stages, is within the power of natural selection; so that an organ rendered, through changed habits of life, useless or injurious for one purpose, might be modified and used for another purpose. An organ might, also, be retained for one alone of its former functions. (*OS*, p.381)¹⁰⁵
Mutability is key. Darwin draws a comparison with written language: 'Rudimentary organs may be compared with the letters in a word, still retained in the spelling, but become useless in the pronunciation, but which serve as a clue for its derivation' (OS, p.382). Since 'the chief part of every living creature is due to inheritance; and consequently, though each being assuredly is well fitted for its place in nature, many structures have no very close and direct relation to present habits of life' (OS, p.152), one might wonder, to extend Darwin's simile, when particular words will become obsolete and disappear from our vocabulary. So it might be with those who no longer fulfil a useful social function.

Darwin's theory of evolution not only stressed the modification of form, but also employed metaphors of economy in its communication. Indeed, as the introduction to a collection of essays on *The Origin of Species* points out, 'the theory of natural selection is consistently and explicitly cast as a theory of political economy in nature'.¹⁰⁶ In *The Origin of Species*, Darwin wrote:

> Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult – at least I have found it so – than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind. Yet unless it be thoroughly ingrained in the mind, the whole economy of nature, with every fact on distribution, rarity, abundance, extinction, and variation, will be dimly seen or quite misunderstood. (OS, p.47)

There is a neat symmetry to Darwin's use of economic images in describing the biological world, since his own theories about this would be adapted by others – notably Herbert Spencer – and applied to the social and economic realm. Even if the idea of the economy of nature is only a figure of speech (though it is surely more than that), the concept of physical alteration was literal enough. Towards the end of the century, Darwinism would combine with the social and political anxieties outlined above to intensify fears about the future shape of things. Most obviously, Darwinian thought was taken by some to reduce the possibility of human agency (though it also allowed for the beneficial results of improving the environment). For Darwin, 'Natural Selection ... is a power ... as immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art' (OS, p.47). The stories of beastly journeys are ones of the human – civilisation, culture, art – cowed by the animal; by the irruption of nature. Max Nordau, a 'convinced Darwinian', identified progress as 'the effect of an ever more rigorous subjugation of the beast in man'.¹⁰⁷ Wilde, of course, challenged this view (and was a particular target of Nordau). Richard
Ellmann’s summary of Wilde’s view – ‘Wilde had always held that the true “beasts” were not those who expressed their desires, but those who tried to suppress other people’s’¹⁰⁸ – illustrates Wilde’s method of taking conventional imagery and subverting it.

Darwin may have carefully avoided making any direct reference to the consequences of his theory for humans in *The Origin of Species* (though not in the later *Descent of Man*), but the economic metaphors mean that the inference can be drawn. Beer points out that '[t]he exclusion of any discussion of man did *not* prevent his readers immediately seeing its implications for “the origin of man and his history”' (*DP*, p.59). As if this were not threatening enough, natural selection involved intergenerational as well as situational or environmental conflict:

> As natural selection acts solely by the preservation of profitable modifications, each new form will tend in a fully-stocked country to take the place of, and finally to exterminate, its own less-improved parent-form and other less-favoured forms with which it comes into competition. Thus extinction and natural selection go hand in hand. (*OS*, p.127)

The social consequences of Darwin’s theory of natural selection become a little more apparent when he writes of how ‘if any one species does not become modified and improved in a corresponding degree with its competitors, it will be exterminated’ (*OS*, p.76). For species, we might well read classes. Certainly, this is the interpretation upon which Social Darwinists’ adaptations of natural selection depended. The worrying message is that failure to modify will result in extermination, but that in any case progress depends on struggle and in that struggle the least fit will expire: ‘natural selection acts by life and death, – by the survival of the fittest, and by the destruction of the less well-fitted individuals’ (*OS*, p.148).

Struggle, extermination, transmutation, and the influence of the environment, with metaphors of nature and the economy used interchangeably, are the principal elements of Darwinism that help distinguish late nineteenth-century representations of beastliness and animality from earlier treatments. The emphasis on change was deeply unsettling. True, sometimes Darwin seems optimistic about the effects:

> Natural selection will modify the structure of the young in relation to the parent, and of the parent in relation to the young. In social animals it will adapt the structure of each individual for the benefit of the whole community; if the community profits by the selected change. What natural selection cannot do, is to modify the structure of one species, without giving it any advantage for the good of another species. (*OS*, p.64)
But at other times, the threat of extinction faced by forms that are no longer useful reverberates in ways that alarmed many of Darwin's contemporaries. It is difficult not to interpret the following passage in terms of social class:

> [N]atural selection is continually trying to economise every part of the organisation. If under changed conditions of life a structure, before useful, becomes less useful, its diminution will be favoured, for it will profit the individual not to have its nutriment wasted in building up a useless structure.
> (OS, p.111)

Wells's *The Time Machine* investigates a future world where exactly this has happened: the leisure-class Eloi have, physically and figuratively, lost their stature. Years of existence without useful toil have turned them into effete and decorative specimens. The fearful result for class relations is something the tale explores, as Chapter Three, on Wells (whom Beer does not mention in her otherwise excellent book on the effects of evolutionary thought upon narrative structure in literature), will show.

Perhaps as worrying to Darwin's readers would have been his procla-
mation that 'the appearance of new forms and the disappearance of
old forms ... are bound together' (OS, p.282). While this may lead to
progression, it ensures destruction also: 'The extinction of old forms is
the almost inevitable consequence of the production of new forms' (OS,
p.299). Clearly, this language can be applied to other spheres besides the
biological. Those that I shall concentrate on in this book are the socio-
cultural, political, and literary. We have seen something of the first two
already in this introduction. The significance for literature of Darwin's
ideas about the replacement of old forms by new is evident in Raymond
Williams's formulation of 'complex relations between what can be called
dominant, residual, and emergent institutions and practices'. These exist
'[a]t any particular point', and the key to their analysis is 'investigation
and identification of the specific places these occupy within an always
dynamic field'. Of course, Williams is writing more under the conscious
influence of Marxist than Darwinist thought, but they cannot always
be easily separated (as *The Time Machine* shows) and the connections
between the social and biological are in any case made in the metaphors
applied to both. What also links them is the sense of instability.
Williams reminds us that 'any historical analysis, when it centres on
a date, has to begin by recognizing that though all dates are fixed, all
time is in movement'.¹⁰⁹ The same is true of species. Evolution depends
on the chance mutation of a specimen, which, proving advantageous
to survival, is preserved as a characteristic in its descendants. The key
is transformation; the mutations carry the old and anticipate the new.

To compare physical and literary forms in this regard is not fanciful.
Indeed, Darwin's writing has itself been seen to embody his theories.
According to Jeff Wallace, *The Origin of Species* displays a 'tension
between the familiar and the absurd, tradition and revolution, in its own
form'.¹¹⁰ At least one commentator has compared the textual variations
of *The Origin of Species* (six editions published between 1859 and 1872)
with 'organic evolution'.¹¹¹ Darwinism itself changed shape.¹¹² Peter
Keating notes that

> it was not always Darwinism itself that exercised the minds of novelists: it
> tended to enter British fiction as a re-import, returning to its native land in
> various guises and modifications, fitting itself easily into Schopenhauerian
> pessimism, French naturalism, and Nietzschean elitism.¹¹³

What is more, Darwin conceives of the imagination as bringing together
the past and present to shape something new. Raymond Williams quotes
him as writing (in 1871):

> Imagination is one of the highest prerogatives of Man. By this faculty he
> unites, independently of the will, former images and ideas, and thus creates
> brilliant and novel results.¹¹⁴

Williams develops this idea, using others, also, to argue that imagination
has a past, present, and future. From Darwin and Associationist
psychology and psychoanalysis, he derives the 'sense of imagination
as working on the past to create some new present'. In 'ideas of
divination' and 'different and more rational bases', imagination is turned
towards the future, 'towards foreseeing what will or could happen'.
And imagination operates in the present by enabling us to 'understand
what it is like to be in some other contemporary condition: bereaved,
unemployed, insane'.¹¹⁵ Admittedly, Williams then makes a distinction
between imagination and the process of writing fiction, using a term he
employed earlier in the criticism of novels and which he now applies to
his own experience of literary creativity, 'structures of feeling', to describe
the latter. This distinction notwithstanding, Williams's comments on
dominant, emergent, and residual forms and on the tenses of the
imagination parallel Darwin's about evolutionary time and natural
selection. That is, historical process and the environment modify forms,
whether physical, literary, or social.

The relationship between Darwinism and narrative form has been
examined by Beer, who, observing that '[w]hen it is first advanced,
theory is at its most fictive' (DP, p.3), notices that Darwin 'sought to
appropriate and to recast inherited mythologies, discourses, and narrative
disorders. He was telling a new story, against the grain of the language
available to tell it in' (DP, p.5). His 'ideas profoundly unsettled the
received relationship between fiction, metaphor, and the material world'
(DP, p.31). Beer notes the 'two-way traffic' of ideas, metaphors, myths,
and narrative patterns between scientists and non-scientists as the former
'drew openly' in their texts 'upon literary, historical and philosophical
material as part of their arguments' and general readers were able
to turn directly and respond to the primary works of scientists (DP,
p.7). According to Beer, the influence of evolutionary theory upon the
nineteenth-century novel was such that it affected not only theme but
organisation. So, for example,

[a]t first evolutionism tended to offer a new authority to orderings of
narrative which emphasised cause and effect, then descent and kin. Later
again, its eschewing of fore-ordained design ... allowed chance to figure as
the only sure determinant. (DP, p.8)

Evolutionism was ‘rich in contradictory elements which can serve as a
metaphorical basis for more than one reading of experience’ (DP, p.9).
Remarking that ‘the concepts of metamorphosis and of transformation
were organised in nineteenth-century fiction by [a] third, crucial, term
... Development’, Beer argues that ‘[m]etamorphosis and development
offer two radical orders for narrative: the tension between the two orders
and the attempt to make them accord can be observed in the organi-
sation of many Victorian fictions. Causal relations preoccupy novelists
and biologists alike’ (DP, p.112).

Much of the literature of the late 1880s and 1890s expresses newness
in old forms (the urban poetry of John Davidson being an example).
Some of it was shockingly and dangerously new. Sturgis reminds us
that Henry Vizetelly, the publisher who introduced (in translation) the
novels of Emile Zola to England, was jailed in 1888 for six months on
charges of obscenity following the publication of *The Earth*. Although
'[t]he unflinching naturalism of [Zola's] works, many chronicling in
explicit terms the bestial degradation of working-class existence, had
from the start provoked scandal, publicity and, of course, sales',¹¹⁶
Vizetelly's company was bankrupted after his conviction.
## Animals, humans, and in-between

Humans may have been labelled as beasts, but the process also happened in reverse and met at intermediate states, too. Perceptions of animal attributes in humans were mirrored by the ascription of human traits to animals.¹¹⁷ Harriet Ritvo has emphasised the ways in which nineteenth-century classifications of the animal world justified the hierarchy of, and among, humans. For example: ‘The dichotomy between domesticated animals and wild animals was frequently compared to that between civilized and savage human societies’, and ‘[w]hen animals stood for foreigners, the hierarchy of nature was apt to be presented in the stark, violent terms of conquest.’¹¹⁸ Descriptions of animals favoured those that ‘displayed the qualities of an industrious, docile and willing human servant’, so that ‘subordination to human purposes transfigured and elevated the animal itself’. On the other hand, ‘the worst not only declined to serve, but dared to challenge human supremacy’ (p.17), just as beastly people threatened the social and moral order. Ritvo observes that ‘[t]he concomitant of the praise heaped on animals that knew their places and kept happily to them was the opprobrium endured by less complaisant creatures’ (p.21). The same applied to assessments of people. ‘For both animals and people a distinguished lineage divided those with hereditary claims to high status from arrivistes’, writes Ritvo (p.61), who suggests that the activities of the Kennel Club (founded in 1873)

expressed the desire of predominantly middle-class fanciers for a relatively prestigious and readily identifiable position within a stable, hierarchical society ... The identification of elite animal with elite owner was not a confirmation of the owner's status but a way of redefining it. (p.104)

### After *The Origin of Species*:

The emerging continuity between animals and people made it even easier to represent human competition, and the social hierarchies created by those who prevailed, in terms of animals ... Animals became the types not just of domestic servants and other laborers, but of the exotic peoples that Europeans subjugated in the course of the nineteenth century. (pp.40–41)¹¹⁹

### According to Ritvo:

Darwin may have transformed the relation between human beings and other animals in principle, but the egalitarianism he had suggested by including humankind among the beasts had little practical effect, even on the thinking of naturalists. More influential was the notion of the survival of ‘the vigorous, the healthy and the happy’, which seemed to justify and
even celebrate human ascendancy. Animals remained the symbols of various orders within human hierarchies, as well as the victims of human control. (p.41)

But there is no single view of Darwin, whose ideas were, in any case, open to continual reinterpretation, even by himself. That was so in the nineteenth century, and it is as true now. Beer notes that '[William] Paley, Darwin, and [Charles] Kingsley all take particular delight in the processes of transformation, though the ideological patterns that they perceive vary profoundly.'¹²⁰ Kingsley, like Darwin, 'move[d] away from the Paleyian model, in which the young through all its transformations, strives backwards to become the parent type' and proposed instead 'the value of change, mutation, the new beginning – and this is part both of his Darwinian and his socialist thinking'.¹²¹ Whereas Ritvo writes that 'Darwin speculated that the wildness often shown by hybrids of domestic species had the same cause as the wickedness that characterized human half-breeds' (p.16), Darwin himself was, according to Beer, 'bent on re-emphasising community'. His theory's support for monogenesis placed him in the camp of those who believed that all 'races' had a common origin and were related. This belief was in opposition to those – the polygenists – who maintained that the 'races' were separate and who wished to emphasise their separateness from the Caucasian. 'The idea of a common progenitor gave an egalitarian basis to theories of development, whether of races or of species' (DP, p.117).¹²² Beer stresses that Darwin took 'considerable pains – not always successfully – to avoid legitimating current social order by naturalising it' (DP, p.58). She points out that among the multiplicity of stories inherent in evolution were the contradictory ones of equality and domination:

> Whereas the story of man's kinship with all other species had an egalitarian impulse, the story of development tended to restore hierarchy and to place at its apex not only man in general, but contemporary European man in particular – our kind of man, to the Victorians. (DP, p.114)

In Beer's view:

> One of the most disquieting aspects of Darwinian theory was that it muddied descent, and brought into question the privileged 'purity' of the 'great family'. In terms of the class organisation of his time this is clearly a deeply unpalatable view.

> ... The utopian drive in Darwin's thinking declares itself in the levelling tendency of his language, which always emphasises those elements in meaning which make for community and equality and undermine the
hierarchical and the separatist. Darwin's rejection of special creation leads him to an enhanced evaluation of all life and to an emphasis on deep community. So classification becomes not an end in itself but an arrested moment in a long story. Taxonomy and transformation are set in tension. (DP, pp.63–64)

The tension between taxonomy and transformation well describes the situation in which the beastly journeys of this book are made: the threat posed by the creatures that are caught up in these narratives arises from their slipping out of place. Their misshapenness makes them difficult to label. The literature discerns the transformation and attempts to describe and capture it.

Intermediacy – the occupation of a position between classifications – also bothers Nordau and those with similar views. Tracing a link between degeneracy and the 'originators of all the fin-de-siècle movements in art and literature' (p.17), Nordau observes that '[q]uite a number of different designations have been found for these persons. Maudsley and Ball call them "Borderland dwellers" – that is to say, dwellers on the borderland between reason and pronounced madness' (p.18). Nordau then discusses the 'lower stages' of degeneracy, in which

> the degenerate does not, perhaps, himself commit any act which will bring him into conflict with the criminal code, but at least asserts the theoretical legitimacy of crime; seeks, with philosophically sounding fustian, to prove that 'good' and 'evil,' virtue and vice, are arbitrary distinctions; goes into raptures over evildoers and their deeds; professes to discover beauties in the lowest and most repulsive things; and tries to awaken interest in, and so-called 'comprehension' of, every bestiality. (p.18)

The higher or fully-fledged degenerates lack the 'sense of morality and of right and wrong. For them there exists no law, no decency, no modesty' (p.18). Clearly, the states of travel and bestiality are connected in the mind of the degenerate-hunter. Even the journeying of the creative mind is distrusted: the degenerate 'rejoices in his faculty of imagination ... and devotes himself with predilection to all sorts of unlicensed pursuits permitted by the unshackled vagabondage of his mind' (p.21). Wagner and the 'morally insane' 'vagabond' Whitman, whose fame rests on his 'bestially sensual pieces' (p.231), are attacked by Nordau for their incapacity to submit their 'capriciously vacillating thoughts' to regular form (p.232). Nordau turns to animal metaphors to convey and condemn the comportment of those whom he regards as criminals, decadents, and mentally diseased. For example: 'In the degenerate with disturbed equilibrium consciousness has to play the part of an
ape-like mother finding excuses for the stupid and naughty tricks of a spoiled child' (p.111). And 'he who places pleasure above discipline, and impulse above restraint, wishes not for progress, but for retrogression to the most primitive animality' (p.554). We are close to Freud's notion of the id here – a resemblance that reminds us that Freud drew on the same sets of metaphors. Sometimes the criticism of animal-like behaviour is directed at literary characters: 'The sole characteristic distinguishing these [Ibsen's] Lövborgs, Ekdals, Oswald Alvings, etc., from beasts is that they are given to drink' (p.405). At other times and often simultaneously it was directed at the creators of these characters. So, when Nordau finds in Ibsen a 'revolt against the prevailing moral law, together with a glorification of bestial instincts', his contempt for this 'egomaniacal anarchist' (p.356) is one that many of his contemporaries felt as they railed against literary naturalism – 'the premeditated worship of pessimism and obscenity' (p.497) – for indulging in the vices it purported to show.

## Beastly sex

While the social body was experiencing the changes outlined above and in Chapter One, the sexual body was undergoing an often shocking crisis. Elaine Showalter writes that:

> The 1880s and 1890s, in the words of the novelist George Gissing, were decades of 'sexual anarchy,' when all the laws that governed sexual identity and behavior seemed to be breaking down ... During this period both the words 'feminism' and 'homosexuality' first came into use, as New Woman and male aesthetes redefined the meanings of femininity and masculinity.¹²³

Among the many episodes of sexual scandal were rumours of a homosexual circle centred on the Foreign Minister, Lord Rosebery (rumours stoked by Lord Queensberry, whose eldest son, Lord Drumlanrig – the brother of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas – committed suicide on 18 October 1894 and had been suspected of involvement in the circle); the divorces of Sir Charles Dilke and Captain Parnell; and the Cleveland Street Affair, in which upper-class men (including Prince Albert Victor, second-in-line to the throne) were implicated in the activities of a male brothel.¹²⁴ Earlier in 1870, the trial of Ernest Boulton and Fredrick Park for conspiracy to commit sodomite acts had received much newspaper attention. Besides legal cases concerning the provision of information on birth control and measures for the control of sexual disease, three other
episodes were especially prominent: the investigation of child prosti-
tution by the journalist W. T. Stead, whose article ‘The Maiden Tribute
of Modern Babylon’ in 1885 resulted in his imprisonment; the murders
committed between the end of August and November 1888 by Jack the
Ripper; and the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895.

We need to take note of the changing conceptions and relations of
gender against which these three sexual scandals took place. Cohen
argues that:

As an integral part of the emergence of mass journalism in the late
nineteenth century, the coverage of sexual scandals was instrumental in
articulating sexual behavior as an element of class and national identities and
conversely in unifying class and national identities in relation to normative
appraisals of sexual behavior.¹²⁵

As Sally Ledger remarks, '[g]ender was an unstable category at the fin de siècle'.¹²⁶ Apart from the growing visibility of homosexuality, which reached its apoee with the trials of Wilde, there was the 'fin de siècle phenomenon' of the New Woman,¹²⁷ who had 'a multiple identity', was 'as a concept ... riddled with contradictions', and excited not only the opposition of many men, but also differences of opinion between women as to who or what constituted her. She was also associated, at this critical moment of endings and beginnings, with modernity. Not only was her identity multiple and contradictory, but her texts were varied also: 'The New Woman writing was aesthetically diverse: it was as if no single form was capable of assimilating the range of experience which the New Woman writers wished to articulate.'¹²⁸

Ledger comments:

> It is no coincidence that the New Woman materialised alongside the decadent and the dandy ... It was the perceived connections between the New Woman and decadence that meant the fate of the New Woman was inextricably linked to the public disgracing of Oscar Wilde.¹²⁹

And '[w]hat most obviously linked the New Woman with the Wildean
decadents of the 1890s was the fact that both overtly challenged Victorian
sexual codes'.¹³⁰

One should not lose sight of the economic context of these shifts
and crises. The growing calls for women's rights, including the passing
of the Married Women's Property Acts in 1870 and 1882, helped erode
the image of woman's separate sphere that lay beyond the material
and economic realm. Of course, for working-class women, economic
engagement had been a grim and necessary reality, but the movement
towards some kind of independence for women helped foster a view of them as economic beings and entities in their own right.¹³¹ The property acts have been described as carrying through ‘one of the great reallocations of property in English history’, and the 1882 Act ‘demanded an end to the old doctrine of the legal unity of husband and wife’.¹³² In 1891, ‘an Act was passed which denied men “conjugal rights” to their wives’ bodies without their wives’ consent’.¹³³

Wim Neetens’s comments on the place of women point to the importance of the socio-economic context:

> The idea of woman's separate sphere was an integral part of Victorian bourgeois ideology: an economically and sexually innocent, 'spiritualised' femininity was seen as the necessary mitigating complement able to influence and redeem the ruthless amorality of capitalist logic, identified as masculine ... Bourgeois femininity functioned as a locus for the non-utilitarian, humane values ousted from the public sphere by the cash nexus and committed to the private circle of the bourgeois drawing-room, where the idea of the family assumed a new dimension.¹³⁴

As Neetens suggests, middle-class feminine domesticity was, in fact, the culmination of, rather than the counter to, capitalism. The accoutrements and signifiers of it were bought by money and were markers of status; the values it embodied were class-based. Nonetheless, the intrusion of the wilderness into the realm of the feminine or the abdication of this exalted position by the New Woman shows crisis. Calls to 'reaffirm the importance of the family as a bulwark against sexual decadence' bear witness to the extent to which it was felt to be under threat and its role as shelter.¹³⁵ These were not only questions of individual morality or even national propriety; they implied, on a larger scale, the fate of Empire: 'many Englishmen regarded the homosexual scandals of the 1880s and 1890s, up to Oscar Wilde's trial, as certain signs of the immorality that had toppled Greece and Rome'.¹³⁶ As Joseph Bristow puts it: 'If the [Wilde] trials prove anything, it is that effeminacy and empire at this point stood in violent opposition.' The effeminate style that Wilde emblematised, which 'represented a distinctly late nineteenth-century apprehension of the male homosexual', ran counter to the state's 'promulgation of a hegemonic ideal of Englishness'. Such was, and continued to be, the antipathy to this new effeminacy that 'homoerotic writing after 1885 constantly defines itself against the predominant assumption that to be a man-loving man necessarily meant that one was weakened, morally and physically, by the taint of effeminacy'.¹³⁷ Once again, there is a confusion of conditions that are normally regarded as separate or
even opposite. The effect of male effeminacy upon animal imagery is discussed in Chapter Five on Wilde, whose greater sin was to embrace members of the working class; to be ‘feasting with panthers’.

There is a direct relationship between the legislation and fiction. Keating writes:

> Just as the Married Women's Property Acts rendered inoperable one of the standard plots of eighteenth and nineteenth-century fiction by making the financial manipulation of women no longer a sinister (and legal) motive for marriage, so, in a more general sense, the expanding democratic institutions of the 1880s and 1890s ... created freer forms of social and sexual relationships which destroyed the novelist's traditional reliance on home-based courtship and marriage.¹³⁸

While this is more apparent in the difficult relationships between parents and children, it

> also affects every other aspect of fiction. In, for example, the ways that characters in novels move around the city streets, whether going to work, college, restaurant, pub, or just taking a walk. In the novels of Gissing, Wells, Bennett, Joyce and Lawrence, there is a degree of individual freedom – of movement and choice – which simply does not exist in fiction of an earlier period, and indeed could not exist because the social conditions which provide the novelist's raw material did not themselves exist. The increasing openness of society at the close of the nineteenth century and the increasingly open narrative forms of early modern fiction go hand in hand.¹³⁹

Similarly, '[f]rom the mid-1890s – inspired by Hardy, Meredith, and the New Woman novelists, and by the social reality of more easily available separation, divorce, and birth-control methods – irregular sexual relationships moved to a central place in British fiction'.¹⁴⁰

These sexual and gender perceptions and shifts have been written about by a number of critics and theorists, but the presence of the beast in the sexual scandals seems to have been less remarked upon. Of all the metaphors of beastliness, the sexual connotations are those that are probably most likely to seem timeless. That is to say, the idea of animal lust may seem to be no more characteristic of 1880s and 1890s Britain than of any other period or culture. But context matters. Thus when Nordau writes of the ‘love of those degenerates who, in sexual transport, become like wild beasts’ (pp.181–182), he is referring to characters in Wagner that ‘behave like tom-cats gone mad’ and ‘reflect a state of mind in the poet which is well known to the professional expert. It is a form of Sadism’ (p.181). Nordau’s comments are aimed at degenerate
art and they belong to his age. Zola was perhaps the prime target. Of
him, Nordau writes:

> That he is a sexual psychopath is betrayed on every page of his novels. He
> revels continually in representations from the region of the basest sensuality
> ... His consciousness is peopled with images of unnatural vice, bestiality,
> passivism, and other aberrations, and he is not satisfied with lingering
> libidinally over human acts of such a nature, but he even produces pairing
> animals. (p.500)

In Nordau, as in others of his type, there seems to be a perverse delight
in the detail of what he finds disgusting.

With or without overt moralising, appalled fascination is apparent
in most of the narratives studied in the present volume. The chapters
that follow explore the entwining of material circumstances and the
metaphors of beastliness and journeys within a range of texts. They
proceed in the spirit of George MacDonald's remark that without the
influence of the imagination, 'no process of recording events can develop
into a history'.¹⁴¹ Their argument is that through the combination of
animal and travel imagery the narratives throw light on the society that
generated them and are best approached through knowledge of that
society, so that the stories they tell can be understood in both their
historical and imaginative aspects. The confusion of shape that the texts
describe and their own experiments with form reflect the conditions that
produced them. Vint's observation that '[f]requently cultural represen-
tations of animals ... will tell us little about the animals themselves and
much about the ways animals become caught up in human ideology'
may be aptly extended to the animal metaphors on exhibition here.¹⁴²

In Chapter One we shall examine the urban habitat, with figures of
various beasts populating an array of fictional and non-fiction narratives
about the city. Chapter Two probes the threat from invaders assuming the
shape of a bat and beetle in novels by Bram Stoker and Richard Marsh,
both published in 1897. Chapter Three considers H. G. Wells's use of
the distancing techniques of time travel, space travel, and shipwreck to
pose social, political, and ethical questions about contemporary society.
Chapter Four concentrates on animal motifs in the fantastic worlds
of George MacDonald. Chapter Five looks at the often subversive
deployment of animal imagery in both the person and writings of
Oscar Wilde. The conclusion to the volume conducts a post-mortem and
contemplates the legacy of this extraordinary corpus, whose edgy sense of
complicity and self-interrogation has largely given way to the derogation
of others for the purposes of exclusion or confinement.
## Notes

1. Georg Lukács, 'Narrate or Describe?', in *Writer and Critic and Other Essays* (London: Merlin Press, 1978), p.147, my emphasis.

2. Peter Keating makes this point in *The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875-1914* [1989] (London: Fontana Press, 1991), p.1, while acknowledging both the drawbacks and usefulness of periodicity (p.2).

3. Keating, *The Haunted Study*, p.2.

4. Keating, *The Haunted Study*, pp.142, 143, 155, 158.

5. John Davidson, 'A Northern Suburb' [1897], reprinted in R. K. R. Thornton, ed., *Poetry of the 'Nineties* (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p.64.

6. Chris Baldick, writing of an earlier period, has made a similar connection, suggesting that: 'The representation of fearful transgressions in the figure of physical deformity arises as a variant of that venerable cliché of political discourse, the “body politic”.'. Chris Baldick, *In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p.14. My readings of the texts and myths discussed in *Beastly Journeys* are influenced by Baldick’s approach, and his ideas are further discussed below, but my focus differs from his, and I depart from some of his interpretations.

7. Max Nordau, *Degeneration* [1892], translated from the second edition of the German work [1895], with an Introduction by George L. Mosse (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), pp.xiv, 5. The first quotation is from Mosse’s introduction.

8. Helen Small, 'Introduction', in Walter Besant, *All Sorts and Conditions of Men* [1882] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p.xv. Small then immediately acknowledges the limitations of the novel's transgressions by remarking that 'the metamorphoses remain clearly a matter of costume drama'. But this qualification affects only Besant's treatment of the changes, not their existence or connection with property.

9. Besant, *All Sorts and Conditions of Men*, p.90, my emphasis.

10. Gillian Beer, *Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction* [1983] (London: Ark, 1985), p.141.

11. Quoted in Marina Warner, *Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p.1.

12. Warner, *Fantastic Metamorphoses*, pp.16, 17, 18.

13. Wim Neetens, *Writing and Democracy: Literature, Politics and Culture in Transition* (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p.69.

14. For Warner, the 'encounter with the Americas seems ... one of the most transformative experiences of history' (*Fantastic Metamorphoses*, p.19).

15. Warner, *Fantastic Metamorphoses*, p.74.

16. Warner, *Fantastic Metamorphoses*, p.19.

17. Warner, *Fantastic Metamorphoses*, pp.18–19.

18. See my 'White Apes at the Fin de Siècle', in Tim Youngs, ed., *Writing and Race* (London: Longman, 1997), pp.166–190.

19. Keating, *The Haunted Study*, p.133.

20. Irving Massey, *The Gaping Pig: Literature and Metamorphosis* (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p.17.
21 Massey, *The Gaping Pig*, pp.3–15.

22 Nordau, *Degeneration*, pp.1–2.

23 Simon Dentith, *Society and Cultural Forms in Nineteenth-Century England* (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), p.181.

24 Matthew Sturgis, *Passionate Attitudes: The English Decadence of the 1890s* (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp.1, 2.

25 Sturgis, *Passionate Attitudes*, p.2.

26 Adam Phillips, *Darwin's Worms* (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1999), p.37. Phillips is quoting Frederick Burckhardt and Sidney Smith from their edition of *The Correspondence of Charles Darwin*, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

27 Phillips, *Darwin's Worms*, p.126.

28 On this latter, see Stephen D. Arata, 'The Occidental Tourist: *Dracula* and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization', *Victorian Studies* 33, 4 (Summer 1990), 621–645.

29 See my discussion of the tale later in this book and Tim Youngs, 'Stevenson's Monkey-Business: *The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde*, in Peter Liebregts and Wim Tigges, eds, *Beauty and the Beast: Christina Rossetti, Walter Pater, R. L. Stevenson and their Contemporaries* (Amsterdam and Georgia: Rodopi, 1996), pp.157–170.

30 This work was, in fact, written by W. T. Stead, using Booth's notes. See Gertrude Himmelfarb, *Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians* [1971] (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1992), p.220.

31 Raymond Williams, *The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence* (London: The Hogarth Press, 1984), p.16.

32 Gillian Beer, reminding us that Darwinism represented continuities, as well as breaks, with existing perceptions, identifies the 'sense that everything is connected, though the connections may be obscured' as giving 'urgency to the enterprise of uncovering such connections'. Beer, *Darwin's Plots*, p.47. Beer notes that Dickens, for whom 'this form of plotting was crucial' (p.27), was one of Darwin's 'most frequently read authors' (p.8).

33 Peter Keating, 'Introduction', in Peter Keating, ed., *Into Unknown England 1866-1913: Selections from the Social Explorers* (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976), p.13 (pp.11–32). And see his discussion of Sherlock Holmes as an explorer. Keating, *The Haunted Study*, p.365.

34 Keating, *Unknown England*, p.15.

35 One of many examples is Christopher Herbert, *Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century* (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), Chapter Four: 'Mayhew's Cockney Polynesia', pp.204–252.

36 Keating, *Unknown England*, p.20.

37 Keating, *The Haunted Study*, p.350. I would not wish to criticise Keating unfairly. *The Haunted Study* is a detailed and valuable work.

38 Elaine Showalter, *Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle* (New York, NY: Viking, 1990), p.2.

39 I limit myself here to narratives that do not deal with actual journeys. I have dealt with the reflection of contemporary crises in travel narratives *per se* in the final three chapters of my *Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850-1900* (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).

40 Showalter, *Sexual Anarchy*, p.4.
41 Massey, *The Gaping Pig*, p.51.

42 David Cannadine, *The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy* (London: Macmillan, 1996), p.16.

43 Cannadine, *Decline and Fall*, p.xvi, my emphasis.

44 Marina Warner, *No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock* (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), p.242, italics in original.

45 Cannadine, *Decline and Fall*, p.xiv.

46 Cannadine, *Decline and Fall*, p.9, Table I.1. He later quotes contemporary figures, showing that '[o]ne-quarter of the land of England and Wales was owned by 710 individuals, and nearly three-quarters of the British Isles was in the hands of less [i.e. fewer] than five thousand people' (p.55).

47 Cannadine, *Decline and Fall*, p.91. Cannadine also quotes Balfour's remark of 1909: "the bulk of the great fortunes are now in a highly liquid state ... They do not consist of huge landed estates, vast parks and castles, and all the rest of it" (p.91). The precarious nature of the new wealth receives attention in US author William Dean Howells's novel, *A Hazard of New Fortunes* (1890).

48 Karl Marx, *Capital: A Critique of Political Economy*, vol. 1, introduction by Ernest Mandel, translated by Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, in association with *New Left Review*, 1990), p.199. The original was first published in 1867. Further page references will be to volume 1 of the 1990 edition and given parenthetically.

49 Quoted by Baldick, *In Frankenstein's Shadow*, p.107. (I have corrected 'people' to 'persons' in Baldick's quotation from Marx.) Baldick mentions this quotation in the context of a discussion of Dickens's animation of things and his representation of characters' mechanical repetitions. (Baldick is also drawing on Dorothy Van Ghent, 'The Dickens World: A View from Todgers's', *Sewanee Review* lviii (1950), 417–438.)

50 Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch, 'Introduction: Money and the Morality of Exchange', in J. Parry and M. Bloch, eds, *Money and the Morality of Exchange* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p.3. Further page references will be given parenthetically.

51 Simon J. James, *Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative in the Novels of George Gissing* (London: Anthem, 2003), pp.4, 2, 7, 4.

52 James, *Unsettled Accounts*, pp.5, 3.

53 Keating, *The Haunted Study*, pp.39, 42.

54 Keating, *The Haunted Study*, p.358.

55 Keating, *The Haunted Study*, pp.358–359. I discuss Wells's *The War of the Worlds* in Chapter Three.

56 Neetens, p.65.

57 Keating, *The Haunted Study*, pp.27–30.

58 Keating, *The Haunted Study*, p.47.

59 Keating, *The Haunted Study*, p.71.

60 Jose Harris, *Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870–1914* [1993] (London: Penguin Books, 1994), p.97.

61 Henry James, 'London', quoted in Walkowitz, *City of Dreadful Delight*, p.15.

62 Cannadine's choice of verb in describing the fate of the aristocracy from the 1880s is also apt: it was, he writes, 'in the process of dissolving itself' (p.89). Although this description seems to combine wish-fulfilment with charity, it is a peculiarly fitting phrase, given the loss of shape that is so important a feature of the texts
that I shall be examining. In particular, we might bear it in mind when we turn to Dracula.

63 Harris, *Private Lives, Public Spirit*, pp.96, 118.

64 Cannadine, *Decline and Fall*, pp.24, 26.

65 Cannadine, *Decline and Fall*, p.26.

66 Neville Kirk, *Change, Continuity and Class: Labour in British Society, 1850–1920* (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p.183.

67 Kirk, *Change, Continuity and Class*, p.143. Kirk is quoting from R. McKibbin, *The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain 1880–1950*.

68 J. F. C. Harrison, *Late Victorian Britain 1870–1901* (London: Fontana Press, 1990), p.67.

69 Kirk, *Change, Continuity and Class*, p.143. Kirk quotes from J. Benson, *The Working Class in Britain 1850–1939*.

70 The figures are from Benson, *The Working Class in Britain*, cited in Kirk, *Change, Continuity and Class*, p.144.

71 Harrison, *Late Victorian Britain*, pp.30–31.

72 For this and more information, see Harrison, *Late Victorian Britain*, pp.22–24. Those who were still excluded from the vote included, apart from women, male householders who had occupied premises for less than a year, domestic servants residing at their employers’ residences, and sons living with their parents. See Harrison, p.24.

73 Cannadine, *Decline and Fall*, p.27. Cannadine concedes that after the 1880 election, the House of Commons was still dominated by landowners, but quotes the *Times*, reporting on 24 August 1883 that: “‘Members have been heard … during the last few weeks asking whether it was any longer an assembly of gentlemen’” (p.188). After the 1885 election, they constituted less than a third of the House, instead of just over a half: ‘For the first time ever, the patricians had ceased to be a majority element in the lower house: their numerical supremacy was gone for good’ (p.189).

74 Cannadine, *Decline and Fall*, p.36.

75 Harrison, *Late Victorian Britain*, pp.33, 49, 50.

76 Neetens, *Writing and Democracy*, p.66.

77 Neetens, *Writing and Democracy*, p.36. Neetens is here drawing on Gareth Stedman Jones, *Outcast London* (1971).

78 Neetens, *Writing and Democracy*, p.37.

79 *Punch*, 26 January 1884. The cartoon is reproduced by Cannadine (*Decline and Fall*, p.38), though he does not follow up the bestial theme.

80 I would therefore want to shore up the second part of Marina Warner’s sentence against its contradictory first part: ‘Fairy tales may contain eternal, psychological insights that can cross borders and span historical periods, but they are articulated within economic and social circumstances which modify their messages.’ (See Warner, *No Go the Bogeyman*, p.319.) Those so-called eternal psychological insights are, of course, identified and interpreted as such in historical moments using cultural tools. If they are judged to possess these universal qualities, the judgement tells us more about the critic’s and audience’s need for transcendence that lends stability.

81 Baldick, *In Frankenstein’s Shadow*, pp.5, 7. Baldick also notes that the meaning of ‘monster’ has metamorphosed. In pre-nineteenth-century usage, which persisted into the nineteenth century, the connotation of monster was also moral in reference
and '[l]ong before the monster of Frankenstein, monstrosity already implied
rebellion, or an unexpected turning against one's parent or benefactor' (p.13). There
is something of that implication in post-Darwinian monsters, too. Also relevant
to the present study is Baldick's reminder that the monsters of classical mythology
are commonly 'composed of ill-assorted parts' (p.13).

82 Dentith, *Society and Cultural Forms*, p.53.

83 Baldick, *In Frankenstein's Shadow*, p.21.

84 Cannadine, *Decline and Fall*, p.38. The contemporary bestial imagery infects even modern-day commentaries on the period: Cannadine, discussing protests in Hyde Park against the House of Lords, refers to a 'monster gathering' (p.41).

85 Cannadine, *Decline and Fall*, p.43.

86 Helen Merrell Lynd, *England in the Eighteen-Eighties: Toward a Social Basis for Freedom* (London: Oxford University Press, 1945), p.238. Lynd identifies the first period as the 1830s and the second as the first half of the 1870s (p.238, unnumbered footnote).

87 Lynd, *The Eighteen-Eighties*, p.292.

88 Lynd, *The Eighteen-Eighties*, p.289.

89 Kirk, *Change, Continuity and Class*, p.167.

90 Founded in 1881 by H. M. Hyndman, the Social Democratic Federation was 'the only avowed Marxist organization in England'. Lynd, *The Eighteen-Eighties*, p.379.

91 Lynd, *The Eighteen-Eighties*, p.283. The preceding details are taken from Lynd, p.282.

92 Lynd, *The Eighteen-Eighties*, p.277.

93 Kirk, *Change, Continuity and Class*, p.167.

94 Lynd, *The Eighteen-Eighties*, p.266.

95 Lynd, *The Eighteen-Eighties*, p.283.

96 *Annual Register*, n.s. 1889, p.177, quoted in Lynd, *The Eighteen-Eighties*, p.287. It is important to note Jones's argument that this middle-class support was a result of the strike leaders' successful emphasis on their strikers' self-discipline, which was why 'middle-class London viewed the mounting wave of strikes, not with feelings of apprehension, but with feelings of relief. There could have been no more pointed contrast between the riots of 1886 and the strikes of 1889.' Gareth Stedman Jones, *Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society* [1971] (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), p.316.

97 Lynd, *The Eighteen-Eighties*, p.425, my emphasis. Lynd's book was published in 1945, hence its gendered language.

98 Lynd, *The Eighteen-Eighties*, p.424.

99 Lynd, *The Eighteen-Eighties*, p.6.

100Margot Norris, *Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence* (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p.15.

101 Norris, p.41. Darwin wrote that: 'By a monstrosity I presume is meant some considerable deviation of structure, generally injurious, or not useful to the species.' Charles Darwin, *The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection*, last (sixth) edition [1872] (London: Watts & Co., n.d.), pp.31–32. (I have used this edition, since it is the closest to my period of study and contains the final revisions. Darwin died in 1882.) Further page references will be given parenthetically as OS.

102Beer identifies a distinction between Ovid's idea of metamorphosis ("Omnia mutantur, nihil interit." Everything changes, nothing dies') and evolutionary
theory. The latter required extinction, whereas metamorphosis 'bypasses death ...
the essential self transposed but not obliterated by transformation' (Beer, *Darwin's Plots*, p.111). Further page references to this work will be given parenthetically as *DP*.

103 Norris, p.40.

104 Virginia Richter, *Literature after Darwin: Human Beasts in Western Fiction, 1859–1939* (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p.9.

105 'This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest.' (OS, p.59)

106 Jeff Wallace, 'Introduction: Difficulty and Defamiliarisation – Language and Process in *The Origin of Species*', in David Amigoni and Jeff Wallace, eds, *Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species: New Interdisciplinary Series* (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p.9.

107 Nordau, *Degeneration*, pp.xvi, 560. (The first quotation is from Mosse's introduction.)

108 Richard Ellmann, *Oscar Wilde* [1987] (London: Penguin, 1988), p.406.

109 Raymond Williams, 'Forms of English Fiction in 1848', in *Writing in Society* (London: Verso, n.d.), p.150.

110 Wallace, 'Introduction: Difficulty and Defamiliarisation', p.2.

111 Peter J. Vorzimmer, *Charles Darwin: The Years of Controversy: The Origin of Species and its Critics 1859-1882* (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1970), quoted in Wallace, 'Introduction: Difficulty and Defamiliarisation', p.15. For a brief discussion of some of the revisions, see pp.17-19 of Jeff Wallace's 'Introduction'. For full details, consult Morse Peckham, ed., *The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: A Variorum Text* (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959).

112 See also Peter J. Bowler, *The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900* (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).

113 Keating, *The Haunted Study*, pp.111-112.

114 Quoted in Raymond Williams, 'The Tenses of Imagination', in *Writing in Society*, p.260.

115 Williams, 'The Tenses of Imagination', p.260.

116 Sturgis, *Passionate Attitudes*, p.70.

117 Sherryl Vint refers to debates in Human-Animal Studies (HAS) over appropriate terminology for 'humans collectively as distinct from non-human beings. Many people reject the terms "human" and "animal" as already ceding too much anthro-pocentrism and reinforcing a boundary whose deconstruction is precisely the point of much of this work.' Acknowledging that 'the distinction of human versus non-human is sometimes used' and that she occasionally employs it, Vint opts mainly for 'the terms "human" and "animal" while recognising their limitations'. *Sherryl Vint, Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal* (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), p.228, n.2.

118 Harriet Ritvo, *The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp.16, 17. Further page references will be given parenthetically.

119 And not only of exotic peoples. See, for example, Jean-Yves Le Disez, 'Animals as Figures of Otherness in Travel Narratives of Brittany, 1840-1895', in Glenn Hooper
and Tim Youngs, eds, *Perspectives on Travel Writing* (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp.71–84.

120 Beer, *Darwin's Plots*, p.130.

121 Beer, *Darwin's Plots*, p.133. For more on Kingsley, see Beer, pp.136–138.

122 Beer, *Darwin's Plots*, p.117. On monogenism and polygenism, as well as on the place of Darwinism in nineteenth-century racial thinking more generally, see George W. Stocking, Jr., *Victorian Anthropology* (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1987).

123 Showalter, *Sexual Anarchy*, p.3.

124 For a brief account of this, see Ed Cohen, *Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities* (New York, NY: Routledge, 1993), pp.121–125.

125 Cohen, *Talk on the Wilde Side*, p.121.

126 Sally Ledger, *The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle* (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p.2.

127 Ledger, *The New Woman*, p.1.

128 Ledger, *The New Woman*, pp.1, 16, 10, 27, 187.

129 Ledger, *The New Woman*, p.94.

130 Ledger, *The New Woman*, p.95.

131 For the relationship between Feminism and Socialism at this time, see Ledger, *The New Woman*, esp. pp.37–50.

132 Elizabeth K. Helsinger et al., *The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837–1883* (3 vols), vol. 2: *The Woman Question: Social Issues, 1837–1883* (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), p.22. The authors write of the 1870 Act that it ‘was fraught with compromise and contradiction’ (p.21). The 1882 Act, on the other hand, ‘provided that a married woman might keep all real and personal property that was hers at the time of marriage or acquired later ... [S]he was able to dispose of her separate property in a will or convey it to her husband.’ (pp.21–22)

133 Ledger, *The New Woman*, p.11. On developments in women’s educational provision and opportunities, see Ledger, p.17.

134 Neetens, *Writing and Democracy*, p.107.

135 Showalter, *Sexual Anarchy*, p.3.

136 Showalter, *Sexual Anarchy*, p.3.

137 Joseph Bristow, *Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885* (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), pp.11, 2, 9, 10.

138 Keating, *The Haunted Study*, p.186.

139 Keating, *The Haunted Study*, p.186.

140 Keating, *The Haunted Study*, p.196.

141 George MacDonald, ‘The Imagination: Its Functions and its Culture’ [1867], in *A Dish of Orts* [1893] (Whitethorn, CA: Johannesen, 1996), p.16.

142 Vint, *Animal Alterity*, p.45.
CHAPTER ONE

City Creatures

Strange ways of thinking

This chapter examines images of beasts and bestiality in selected fictional and non-fictional writing about the city produced during the second half of the 1880s and 1890s. Some of the texts will be better known than others, but the concentration on animal imagery should provide a new approach to even the most familiar of these and is quite distinct from commentaries on naturalism. The focus will be on London, since the main themes explored in this study are evident in the literature set in the capital; in particular, the East End looms especially large. However, it is important to recognise that different cities have their own characteristics and stories to tell.¹ In London, the population had grown from 1,873,676 in 1841 to 4,232,118 a half century later. The figures represented an increase in the proportion of the population of England and Wales from 11.75 per cent to 14.52 per cent. At the same time, other cities had expanded: in 1837, there were five cities throughout England and Wales with populations of 100,000 or more; in 1891, there were twenty-three cities.² Briggs notes that '[a]s the cities grew, the separation of middle-class and working-class areas became more and more marked' (p.64), and social segregation, then, as now, 'induces strange ways of thinking about other human beings. The fear of the city, like other kinds of fear, was often a fear of the unknown' (p.62). Although true, Briggs's words understate the extent to which the different classes rubbed shoulders. As we saw in the introduction, Raymond Williams has shown how the creation of what he calls the 'crisis of the knowable community' in the mid-nineteenth century led novelists such as Elizabeth Gaskell and, above all, Dickens to show how various representatives of the social order were brought into close proximity with one another.³

Bestial language infects the literature of the time. It is present in far more cases than are offered here. William Fishman's study of the East End in the late 1880s quotes a number of examples, among them Ben
Tillett’s memory of the daily struggle of the unemployed to obtain work at the docks:

> Coats, flesh and even ears were torn off. The strong literally threw themselves over the heads of their fellows and battled ... through the kicking, punching, cursing crowds to the rails of the 'cage' which held them like rats - mad human rats who saw food in the ticket.⁴

Tillett’s description could just as well belong to the narrative of a late nineteenth-century realist or naturalistic novel. Indeed, the first chapter of Arthur Morrison’s *A Child of the Jago* (1896) relates how ‘Old Jago Street lay black and close under the quivering red sky; and slinking forms, as of great rats, followed one another quickly between the posts in the gut by the High Street, and scattered over the Jago.’⁵ The reduction of humanity to a desperate animalistic competition for survival is shared by both documentary and imaginative writing. What both forms have in common in this context is a journalistic urge to record the plight of the destitute and the precariousness of those who, for the moment, exist just above the breadline (a noun whose first print usage the OED dates to 1900 in the US). Fishman also quotes Beatrice Webb’s view of loafers as ‘low looking, bestial, content with their own condition’.⁶ Thomas Jackson, a Methodist preacher and philanthropist, witnesses a drunken woman carried away by police, ‘shrieking and cursing; a dehumanised thing, as morally insensate as the beasts that perish, and far less clean’.⁷ Margaret Harkness, writing in *A City Girl* (1887), observes that '[m]en who at other times were civil and pleasant enough, became like wild beasts the night after they received their wages'.⁸ In a novel published two years later, Harkness remarks that 'in these days animals are better off than slum children'.⁹

For all the writing on the working and underclasses, we must apply to the larger situation what Fishman notes of attitudes towards the workhouse in particular, that: ‘The tragedy is the absence of any written text from the paupers themselves, who lacked either the ability or the desire to write.’¹⁰ Like the colonised, the urban poor are inscribed in the discourse of others, without the means to represent themselves, except through interview. They are framed by spectators. Their lack of voice deepens their brutishness and increases the apprehension felt by those who look on, scared of the fragility of the barriers between them. Yet, the compulsion to observe was inescapable, as Anne Humpherys attests:

> The Victorians themselves were fascinated and intermittently horrified by their developing urbanization; for them, the issue was almost always how
to ‘see’ the inarticulate lower classes that crowded into both the industrial
cities and the metropolitan center of London, and through this seeing, to
rationalize and control urbanization and its effects.¹¹

At the end of the nineteenth century, the urban environment contained
the threats of social and psychological disintegration and contamination.
The resulting anxieties about decline and corruption not only inform the
writings of the period, but shape them, too. We shall see in the next
chapter how they alter the template of the Gothic. For now, the focus
is on journalism, realism, and naturalism. Before moving on we should
note that what follows is not simply a beastly parade. The creatures
on which we gaze are made what they are by the deforming effects of
capitalism, even if the texts that represent them sometimes fall short
of recognising the fact. To understand them one needs to see them as
moulded by their milieu. Central to determining their shape is money,
which, as David Harvey puts it, ‘becomes the mediator and regulator of
all economic relations between individuals; it becomes the abstract and
universal measure of social wealth and the concrete means of expression
of social power’.¹² Harvey argues that ‘the very existence of money as
a mediator of commodity exchange radically transforms and fixes the
meanings of space and time in social life and imposes necessities upon
the shape and form of urbanization’. He contends that in the ‘urban
processes under capitalism … confusion, conflict and struggle are a
normal condition’ and there ‘is an underlying process that precludes
liberation from the more repressive aspects of class-domination and all of
the urban pathology and restless incoherence that goes with it’.¹³ Placing
money (or its lack) at the heart of our readings allows us to enhance
our understanding of the literary reflection of this phenomenon and,
especially, the ghastly consequences of impecuniousness.

Changing hands: *The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde*¹⁴

Money is at the root of Stevenson's famous tale of *The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde*. Since part of the horror of Hyde is his ape-like appearance, then we must try to recover something of the impressions that such imagery evoked for readers at the time. When Hyde is described as manifesting 'ape-like fury' in trampling to death Sir Danvers Carew, Member of Parliament,¹⁵ then plainly something much more interesting is going on than a simple exposition of the struggle between good or evil or the return of the sexually repressed or the anti-social conduct of
a secret alcoholic – all of which interpretations are commonly advanced. Stevenson’s tale was published just two years after the 1884 Reform Act, which had been preceded by increasing agitation by, and on behalf of, the disenfranchised. Unrest did not cease with the passing of the Act. There were riots in Trafalgar Square during the year of *The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’s* publication, most famously on 8 February after a severe winter during which the depression of the mid- to late 1880s was at its height. Twenty thousand people, mostly unemployed dock and building workers, had gathered there.

Gareth Stedman Jones has written fascinatingly of the ‘deep-rooted’ and ‘comprehensive’ social crisis of the 1880s.¹⁶ According to Jones, ‘[t]he cyclical depression of 1884–7 was both more prolonged and hit a far broader spectrum of occupations than the slumps of 1866 and 1879’.¹⁷ It ‘greatly accentuated an already endemic condition of under-employment, and the hard winters that accompanied it intensified distress to chronic proportions’.¹⁸ While the rich were generally able to preserve their physical separation from the poor, the ‘poor themselves were becoming more closely crammed together regardless of status or character’,¹⁹ contributing to increased discontent among the ‘respectable working class’, as the actual and metaphorical distance between them and the casual poor or ‘residuum’ diminished. The residuum was considered dangerous not only because it was seen to be degenerate, but because ‘its very existence served to contaminate the classes immediately above it’.²⁰ From 1883 onwards, newspapers and journals were ‘full of warnings of the necessity of immediate reform to ward off the impending revolutionary threat’.²¹ Jones cites, as an example, Samuel Smith’s warning in 1885 that ‘[t]he proletariat may strangle us unless we teach it the same virtues which have elevated the other classes of society’.²²

This was not, of course, the only kind of disruption in London at the time. On 24 January 1885, Fenians exploded three bombs simultaneously at Westminster Hall, the Houses of Parliament, and the Tower of London.²³ (And it is well known that the Irish were often referred to as beasts, including apes.)²⁴ Abroad, events had recently heightened the sense of a crisis of authority, with the death of General Gordon in Khartoum also occurring in 1885.

Jones characterises the predominant feeling of the 1880s among the intellectual and propertied classes as ‘not guilt but fear’.²⁵ At this time, accounts of ‘Outcast London’ exhibited little sympathy or empathy:

> The poor were presented as neglected, and even to a certain extent exploited
> ... But they did not emerge as objects of compassion. They were generally
pictured as coarse, brutish, drunken, and immoral; through years of neglect and complacency they had become an ominous threat to civilization.²⁶

Such attitudes accompanied the rise of the discourse of urban degeneration. It was seen as inevitable that as a result of their environment the poor would become ‘brutalized and sexually immoral’, seeking the alcoholic and salacious entertainments offered by pubs, music-halls, and prostitutes. Darwinian thinking encouraged the idea that this ‘adapting down’ to one’s surroundings would have increasingly deleterious effects through the generations. However, in a significant twist, it was thought by some that beneficial legislation and improvements in medical science and sanitation had controverted Darwinian laws, allowing for the survival and growth of the unfit.²⁷ This begs the question of what constitutes unfitness, and it is this question, involving notions of social, physical, and moral health, that helps make so many of the popular texts of the late nineteenth century so engagingly troublesome.

It is interesting that Jones includes as one of the middle-class responses to the social crisis of the 1880s that of the social imperialist. He quotes from Lord Brabazon's *Social Arrows* (1886):

> Let the reader walk through the wretched streets ... of the Eastern or Southern districts of London ... should he be of average height, he will find himself a head taller than those around him; he will see on all sides pale faces, stunted figures, debilitated forms, narrow chests, and all the outward signs of a low vital power.²⁸

The importance of this kind of image lies in its kinship with Hyde and similarly with the Morlocks of Wells's *The Time Machine* (1895). David Punter nicely sums up the various concerns at play here and what they have in common when, considering the 'decadent Gothic' of the fin de siècle, of which he lists *The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde*, *The Picture of Dorian Gray*, *The Island of Doctor Moreau*, and *Dracula* as the most potent examples, he writes:

> they are all concerned in one way or another with the problem of degeneration, and thus of the essence of the human. They each pose, from very different angles, the same question, which can readily be seen as a question appropriate to an age of imperial decline: how much, they ask, can one lose — individually, socially, nationally — and still remain a man? One could put the question much more brutally: to what extent can one be 'infected' and still remain British?²⁹

Punter's reading is astute, for he also suggests, rightly, that 'Hyde's behaviour is an urban version of "going native"'.³⁰ It is hardly surprising,
given the similarities of the language applied to subordinated social and racial groups and the common identity of the controlling force in both cases, that a disturbance in one sphere should find its echoes in the other.

Utterson, the lawyer, may have trouble defining Hyde, who ‘gave an impression of deformity without any namable malformation’ (p.13), but the impression is conveyed to the readers through racial and bestial terms. Hyde has a ‘savage laugh’ (p.13); he is, to Poole, a ‘masked thing like a monkey’ (p.37); he plays, according to Jekyll, ‘apelike tricks’ (p.61) and exhibits ‘apelike spite’ (p.62); he displays, as we have seen, ‘ape-like fury’ in killing Carew (p.19); he gives a screech ‘as of mere animal terror’ (p.38) when cornered in the laboratory, and his hand is ‘lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor, and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair’ (p.54). In the manuscript, he is described as behaving with a ‘mixture of cowardice and savagery’.31 He drinks ‘pleasure with bestial avidity’ (p.53). It is true that he is also ‘pale and dwarfish’ (p.13), but much like Wells’s Morlocks in *The Time Machine* ten (or rather several thousand) years later, the shock comes with the idea of a white ape – a creature that haunts popular texts with increasing menace during the fin de siècle as biological theories of degeneration combine with political fear regarding the socially repressed and a growing obsession with the psychological unconscious to effect agitated inspections of the subterranean and interior. Utterson thinks it ‘madness’ or a ‘disgrace’ that in the event of Jekyll’s death or disappearance for longer than three months (p.9), Hyde should stand to inherit Jekyll’s ‘quarter of a million sterling’ (p.20). Like his real-life counterparts, Utterson endeavours ever more frantically to maintain an identification of name with wealth; of social with financial status. Mr Enfield, too, relates how, after witnessing Hyde trampling on a young girl, he and the attendant doctor

told the man we could and would make such a scandal out of this, as should make his name stink from one end of London to the other. If he had any friends or credit, we undertook that he should lose them. (p.5)

In other words, a social death is resolved upon. The idea of credit in the dual sense of money and morality is prominent here. Hyde should be deprived of financial and social worth. Enfield goes on to recall how ‘we screwed him up to a hundred pounds for the child’s family’:

> The next thing was to get the money; and where do you think he carried us but to that place with the door? – whipped out a key, went in, and presently came back with the matter of ten pounds in gold and a cheque for the balance on Coutts’s, drawn payable to bearer, and signed with a name that
I can't mention, though it's one of the points of my story, but it was a name at least very well known and often printed. The figure was stiff; but the signature was good for more than that, if it was only genuine. (p.6)

The suspicious Enfield accepts Hyde's offer to remain with him until the banks open in the morning and has him stay the night in his (Enfield's) chambers where the doctor and the girl's father also join them. In the morning, Enfield tells Utterson, 'I gave in the cheque myself, and said I had every reason to believe it was a forgery. Not a bit of it. The cheque was genuine' (p.6). Since Stevenson has gone to some trouble to record the details of the cheque and its encashment, it can hardly be irrelevant to notice that '[b]y the middle of the 'eighties private banking was becoming almost extinct in England',³² as provincial bankers lost their influence to the London money market, and that

[i]ndividual banks were losing any claim to independent status and stability. At the same time 'personal character' ceased to be valid security for loans and overdrafts when the old local bankers, with their individual knowledge of all their clients, were replaced by distant directors whose lack of such knowledge compelled them to confine their loans within hard and fast rules. A structure of big finance was emerging along with the growth of big business.³³

The relevance of this lies in Enfield's (and the reader's) doubt that personal character counts in the case just related. There is a strong feeling, even after Enfield has been reassured the cheque is genuine, that there can be no proper correspondence between Hyde, who is 'really damnable', and Jekyll, who is 'the very pink of the proprieties' (p.6), leading Enfield to the conclusion that this must be a case of blackmail. The confusion over character and wealth thus becomes increasingly apparent the more Enfield and Utterson try to explain it. The more they rely on outmoded ideas of a match between physical wealth and personal quality, the less able they are to comprehend the actual state of affairs between them.

Stevenson's tale feeds directly into arguments over what constituted the 'gentleman'. We hear these anxieties in Poole's plaintive cry to Utterson: "O, sir ... do you think I do not know my master after twenty years?" We gauge the extent of this crisis by our knowledge that Poole, indeed, fails to recognise 'that thing' – Hyde – as his master (p.36). Poole does not know his master after twenty years, just as many in society were no longer sure who their masters were.

Jekyll's statement tells us he was

born ... to a large fortune, endowed besides with excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of the wise and good among my
fellow-men, and thus, as might have been supposed, with every guarantee
of an honourable and distinguished future. (p.48)

In this, we must see him as representative of his class. When he proceeds
to explain his fall, I am less interested in its particular aspect (which in the
manuscript version is hinted much more heavily to be homosexuality,³⁴
and, of course, 1885 was the year of the Labouchere Amendment) than
in the fact of his decline, which ought to be taken as a reflection of the
condition of many of his class. Jekyll's statement tells us:

> With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and
> the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth by whose partial
> discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not
> truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge
> does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me
> on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known
> for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.
> (pp.48–49)

This declaration needs careful reading. It is common for readers of the tale
and viewers of the films based on it to take Jekyll and Hyde as different
personalities, albeit hosted by the same body. This is understandable, as
Stevenson is caught in the paradox of physically projecting and thereby
separating the conflicting components of the same person. (Jekyll refers
to his consciousness of the 'perennial war among my members' [p.48].)
Such a reading might further be encouraged by Jekyll's reference to what
he calls the 'thorough and primitive duality of man' (p.49). But scrutiny
of his remarks soon reveals that his crisis is brought about by his desire
to separate the elements that are at war within him. His explanation of
this is crucial, so I quote it here at length:

> I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness,
> even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically
> both; and from an early date, even before the course of my scientific
> discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked possibility of such a miracle,
> I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought
> of the separation of these elements. If each, I told myself, could but be housed
> in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the
> unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his
> more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on
> his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and
> no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous
> evil. It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus
> bound together – that in the agonised womb of consciousness these polar
twins should be continuously struggling. How, then, were they dissociated?
(p.49)

The story of Jekyll is the story of his ultimate failure to separate and keep
apart these elements. It is not particularly rewarding to read this failure
in terms of morality – whether in a general Christian, specific Calvinist,
or broad philosophical sense – or as an allusion to a particular vice. If we
look again at Stevenson's use of the word 'polity' in the earlier quotation,
then we surely have to review the passage against the social background.
Whatever the dangers of taking Jekyll's statement at face value, the ideas
that emerge from it seem to point unmistakably to the social changes
and disturbances that were taking place at the time. Jekyll's statement
can be taken as a grudging recognition that the polity, the state, consists
of all its classes and that to try to keep them apart will lead, in fact, to a
destructive imbalance. It hardly gives a welcome embrace to democracy,
but in that it is in keeping with several other exclamations of the era.
The important point is that it acknowledges the futility of attempting to
continue the suppression of the baser side of oneself, of what Jekyll calls
the 'lower elements in my soul' (p.50). Here, as elsewhere, the socially
respectable and privileged self stands for the social body at large.

Our introduction to Jekyll's house shows very clearly the threat to his
social decline, either from his own fall or from contamination by his
surroundings:

> Round the corner from the by-street there was a square of ancient, handsome
> houses, now for the most part decayed from their high estate, and let in flats
> and chambers to all sorts and conditions of men: map-engravers, architects,
> shady lawyers, and the agents of obscure enterprises. One house, however,
> second from the corner, was still occupied entire; and at the door of this,
> which wore a great air of wealth and comfort, though it was now plunged in
darkness except for the fan-light, Mr. Utterson stopped and knocked. (p.14)

This evocation of corruption and decline is a more dramatic sign of
threatened and changed identities than the transmutation of Jekyll into
Hyde, which, after all, merely personifies the larger alteration already
implicit in the narrative. The ancient, handsome houses are not just
decayed and not only divided, but are let to 'all sorts and conditions
of men' (p.14). The square shows in microcosm the changes that many
saw happening in late nineteenth-century society. The old families have
moved out, unable any longer to afford their mansions. Their property
has been split up to accommodate those from a 'lower' station. Baseness
– that is, lowness and vulgarity – is what surrounds Jekyll's now-isolated
house, whose tenuous hold on grandeur is apparent when we are told
that it ‘wore a great *air* of wealth and comfort’, as if, like a garment, it
can be shaken off or pulled away (p.14, my emphasis). We can hardly
have a more visible representation of the shifting power relations than
this, unless it be the description of Hyde’s home in its ‘dismal quarter
of Soho’, which to Utterson seems ‘like a district of some city in a
nightmare’ as

the fog lifted a little and showed him a dingy street, a gin palace, a low
French eating-house, a shop for the retail of penny numbers and two-penny
salads, many ragged children huddled in the doorways, and many women
of many different nationalities passing out, key in hand, to have a morning
glass; and the next moment the fog settled down again upon that part, as
brown as umber, and cut him off from his blackguardly surroundings. This
was the home of Henry Jekyll’s favourite; of a man who was heir to a quarter
of a million sterling. (p.20)

This last sentence is surely meant as a more frightening incongruity
than that which sees Hyde take over Jekyll’s body. The prospect of
the gentleman’s fortune ending up in such a squalid environment was
a greater horror for Stevenson’s well-to-do contemporaries than the
fantastic metaphor of Jekyll’s transformation.

The identification of the beastly Hyde with the unruly elements of
mass society that challenge the position of Jekyll and his peers has
been made before. In a richly suggestive essay,³⁵ Patrick Brantlinger and
Richard Boyle have interpreted the story as an allegory of an artist’s
feelings of contamination at having to write for an undiscerning public.
They quote from a letter written by Stevenson to Edmund Gosse in 1886,
in which he declares:

> I do not write for the public; I do write for money, a nobler deity; and most
> of all for myself, not perhaps any more noble, but both more intelligent and
> nearer home.

> Let us tell each other sad stories of the bestiality of the beast whom we
> feed ... I do not like mankind; but men, and not all of these – and fewer
> women. As for respecting the race, and, above all, that fatuous rabble of
> burgesses called ‘the public,’ God save me from such irreligion! – that way
> lies disgrace and dishonour. There must be something wrong in me, or I
> would not be popular.³⁶

Brantlinger and Boyle claim that it was in part due to his ‘deep-rooted
ambivalence’ towards the literary marketplace that Stevenson ‘responded
ambivalently’ to *The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde* (which he
claimed to have written to meet the bills of Byles the butcher).³⁷ We
might recall here Hyde's words to Enfield and the doctor after they have witnessed his trampling of the girl: "'If you choose to make capital out of this ... I am naturally helpless'" (pp.5-6). Stevenson himself made capital out of this, selling, according to one report, 40,000 copies of his tale within six months of its publication. It has been seen as the first of his stories to win widespread popularity with adults and children. Indeed, Andrew Lang wrote of how Stevenson 'wins every vote, and pleases every class of reader'.³⁸

## ’nother way out: The Jago

Let us consider – as an example of the effects of the lack of money – the case of the young child, Dicky Perrott, in Morrison's *A Child of the Jago*. Dicky turns increasingly to thieving after stealing a watch from a distinguished visitor to the area. The timepiece is taken from Dicky by his father, Josh, who administers a beating, because of his wife's displeasure at her son's slide into criminality. Dicky is offered coffee and cake by Aaron Weech – owner of Weech's coffee shop – but it becomes apparent after he has consumed them that Weech, who has heard of and knows all about Dicky's theft, has not given him the refreshments out of sympathy and goodness as on first appearance, but expects payment for them, knowing full well that Dicky can only pay what he owes by bringing him stolen goods. Of this revelation, the narrator exclaims: 'Each for himself? Come, he must open his eyes' (p.41). Dicky learns lessons from his experience and so can we. The only collective action manifested in his locale is in support of one's own clan in fights against rival groups. Otherwise, it is – to use another animal expression – a dog-eat-dog world (the first use of which phrase the *OED* dates to 1822).

In the Jago the normal order is inverted. Cake and coffee are not expressions of sympathy, but are the means of entrapment into further criminality. The man who does not hit his wife and the family who take some pride in their accommodation are strange anomalies. The Ropers, the family across the way from the Perrotts and from whom Dicky opportunistically purloins a clock, are described by the narrator as being

disliked as strangers because they furnished their own room, and in an obnoxiously complex style; because Roper did not drink, nor brawl, nor beat his wife, nor do anything all day but look for work; because all these things were a matter of scandalous arrogance, impudently subversive of Jago custom and precedent. (p.44)
Similarly, the Ropers' flat displays, in the eyes of Dicky and his neighbour Old Fisher, 'a monstrous absence of dirt' (p.46). Fisher walks into the open door and steals unemployed cabinetmaker Roper's old tools. In the world of the Jago, stealing, violence, and squalor are the norm; honesty and clean-living are the signs of non-conformity. In such passages, the effect of the narrative depends upon an irony that connects the narrator and audience with the world of the Jago by an inversion of shared values. That is to say, in these instances, the narrative works by assuming that the narrator and readers have similar codes of behaviour and that the readers recognise the distance between the narrator and the people whose outlook he describes as though he were straightforwardly explaining it. We shall return to this idea of simultaneous narrative proximity and distance, since it is often identified as a problem or contradiction in realism and naturalism. Suffice to say here that whatever the text's intention, the effect is to emphasise the humanity of the narrator and author in comparison with the animality of those who are paraded before us.

When some of the old houses are cleared, the animal analogies accrue. The wreckers expose

the secret dens of a century of infamy ... letting light and air at last into the subterranean basements where men and women had swarmed, and bred, and died, like wolves in their lairs; and emerging from clouds of choking dust, each man a colony of vermin. (p.98)

The difficulty for realist or naturalistic writers is to convey the brutishness of the conditions of the underclasses while evoking some sympathy for them. They may be depicting repulsive characters, but writers such as Morrison and Gissing wish to move readers to an understanding of the plight of the impoverished and destitute without softening the effects of environment through plot contrivances that offer amelioration impossible in real life. Dicky is told by old Beveridge that the Bag of Nails, where they see all manner of criminals, is

the best the world has for you, for the Jago's got you, and that's the only way out, except gaol and the gallows. So do your devilmost, or God help you, Dicky Perrott – though he won't: for the Jago's got you! (p.63)

The repetition of the phrase 'the Jago's got you' forces home the entrapment. Dicky nearly finds a way out when Sturt helps him obtain a shop assistant's job, but he is sacked when Weech, annoyed by Dicky's growing independence from him, lies to the shopkeeper and plants
the idea in his head that Dicky planned to steal from him. Dicky's unexplained dismissal sees him turn to full-time crime as the only way to support himself and his family, especially after his father is sentenced to five years imprisonment for house-breaking and, on his release, murders Weech in revenge for betraying him to the police and causing Dicky to lose his job.

If there is no real escape for the beasts, they need at least to be protected from the extremes of their wild ways. Father Henry Sturt, the vicar who makes his way into the Jago (and who is modelled on Father Arthur Osborne Jay, Vicar of Holy Trinity, Shoreditch), a 'well-dressed stranger' exuding 'so bold a confidence', is presented as being 'like a tamer among beasts'. This simile occurs when he disperses a mob attack on the Ropers' flat, during which he 'flung them back, commanded them, [and] cowed them with his hard, intelligent eyes' (p.49), but it applies to his role more generally. However, his efforts are largely ineffective. He wins the respect of the locals and they accordingly exercise restraint in front of him, but the forces operating on them are too oppressive and their lifeways too entrenched for him to achieve anything more than light change.

The tragedy of the Jago is that opportunities for both travel and change are limited. The only exit is to other parts of London for thieving. Those who journey to it are fleeting visitors and often the victims of crime within it. Parts are no-go areas for the police. When alteration does occur, it is usually a turn for the worse. Thus, for example, when Josh hacks with a knife at Weech's face and then below his chin, '[t]he bubbling Thing dropped in a heap, and put out the flaring candle' (p.158). The transformation here is from a lying, manipulating dealer in stolen goods to an inhuman object. Dicky's exhortation to Father Sturt – 'Tell Mist' Beveridge there's 'nother way out – better' (p.173) – occurs when he is dying, after having been stabbed by Bobby Roper in a fight between Jago and Dove-Lane factions. Death seems the only release, but it is unaccompanied by any narrative sense of consolation. Dicky's final words illustrate another kind of transformation in *A Child of the Jago*: that of the English language itself. Morrison represents the broken dialect of the slum-dwellers in ways similar to his US counterpart, Stephen Crane, in *Maggie* (1893) and, indeed, comparisons were drawn between them. In his dying sentence, Dicky's truncated words match his stunted physique – his growth is arrested at five feet, two inches – and his restricted intellectual development and cultural appreciation. To say this is not to endorse any judgement of dialect as inferior to Standard English, but to make the point that the bluntness of the speech with its
missing syllables fits the neighbourhood with its missing facilities. The voice of the narrator is in Standard English – a problem associated with much realism and naturalism, since it signals the narrator’s position apart from the other characters. The distance between narrator and characters is underlined by the difference in speech codes, suggesting a gulf in social class and experience. This is often seen as a flaw in such writing: if the characters are determined by their environment, why not the narrator? In Morrison’s case, it appears from extra-textual evidence that his life underwent transformation of a kind not open to his characters. (The nearest exception is Kiddo Cook, who, under Sturt’s encouragement, works up to having a stall, gets married, and moves into one of the new county council dwellings.) Introducing a modern edition of the text, Peter Miles notes that although Morrison was ‘not frank’ in print about his background,³⁹ he ‘was a working-class boy from Poplar who, there is every reason to suppose, grew up in the East End as [the] son of an engine-fitter in the docks’.⁴⁰ Miles observes that ‘there exists little evidence to counter an impression of Morrison as a man who no longer felt the need to write when he could well afford not to, as someone who in later years had found his own fairly comfortable “way out”.’⁴¹ That way out was made possible largely by his success as a dealer in Japanese and Chinese art.

The dichotomous nature of British (more specifically, English) society, and the two-faced conduct it leads to in some, is also exposed by Bernard Shaw. In his preface to *Widowers' Houses* (1892), explaining why it appears with two other works under the title 'Plays Unpleasant', he states:

> the average homebred Englishman, however honorable and good-natured he may be in his private capacity, is, as a citizen, a wretched creature who, whilst clamoring for a gratuitous millennium, will shut his eyes to the most villainous abuses if the remedy threatens to add another penny in the pound to the rates and taxes which he has to be half cheated, half coerced into paying. In Widowers' Houses I have shewn middle-class respectability and younger son gentility fattening on the poverty of the slum as flies fatten on filth. That is not a pleasant theme.⁴²

Here Shaw takes the language of the bestial and reverses it, applying it to those who would normally apply it to others. The loathsome in this case are the excrement-feeding rich, who gorge themselves on the poor. Monstrosity is found not in the habits or appearance of the poor, but in the airs and pretences of the rich. In exposing the exploitation Shaw may escape the charge levelled at Morrison by Kevin Swafford: that *A Child of the Jago* portrays the grotesque, but shows nothing of its larger causes.
Swafford alleges that '[t]he most important ideological objective of the novel is to dissociate any clear connection between West End prosperity and East End poverty by substituting effects for causes'.⁴³ According to Swafford, Morrison's novel neglects to make any critique of capitalism and thus fails to direct attention to the factors responsible for the slum conditions. Shaw, on the other hand, bluntly declares:

> I must, however, warn my readers that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures. They cannot too thoroughly understand that the guilt of defective social organization [lies] ... with the whole body of citizens whose public opinion, public action, and public contribution as ratepayers, alone can replace Sartorious's slums with decent dwellings, Charteris's intrigues with reasonable marriage contracts, and Mrs. Warren's profession with honourable industries guarded by a humane industrial code and a 'moral minimum' wage.⁴⁴

By such strategies Shaw confronts his audience, disclosing their complicity, but he seems at the same time to acquire authority himself through performing the role of truth-teller, which has him occupying a space between the parties.

## Missing link

> I ain't a man ... I ain't nobody. Sometimes I says to myself as I'm 'the missing link,' as I'll come back again as a dog or something. Not but that I'd rather be a dog than a midget ... I'm worse off than a dog now, for folks aren't afraid of dogs, but they won't come nigh me if they can help it ... I've spent my life travelling about to be looked at. I'm tired of it, captain. I don't want to come back again.⁴⁵

So, bitterly, speaks the 'midget' to Captain Lobe of the Salvation Army in Margaret Harkness's 1889 novel *Captain Lobe* (later reprinted as *In Darkest London*). These remarks come just after the 'midget' has asked Lobe if he thinks he, the 'midget', has a soul. The scene occurs in a 'penny gaff' on Whitechapel Road. The road is the 'most cosmopolitan place in London' (p.13). In that respect the district has itself undergone a transformation, and the narrator is scornful of those who refuse to accept the change:

> among the foreigners lounges the East End loafer, monarch of all he surveys, lord of the premises. It is amusing to see his British air of superiority ... He is looked upon as scum by his own nation, but he feels himself to be an Englishman, and able to kick the foreigner back to 'his own dear native
land' if only Government would believe in 'England for the English,' and give all foreigners 'notice'. (IDL, p.13)

The narrator realises that there can and should be no changing back: the 'Hottentot', Jewesses, Algerian, Indian, Italian, Russian, Polish Jew, and German are as much a part of Whitechapel Road as the East End loafer, who has his West End counterpart: 'In the West End they haunt the clubs; in the East End they hang around the public-houses' (IDL, p.13).

The 'midget' recalls only one other kind face apart from the Captain's that he would like to see when he is dying – that of a lady who did not shrink from shaking his hand: 'She said nothing but I could tell she was sorry for me, and often as I lies awake I think of her!' (IDL, p.16). The sentiments recall those of 'the Elephant Man', Joseph Merrick, when similarly the recipient of unflinching but sympathetic acknowledgement. Merrick, now known to have been suffering from neurofibromatosis, was discovered by the surgeon Sir Frederick Treves in 1884 being exhibited as the 'Elephant Man' in London for money by a showman. Treves later recalled that:

> Painted on the canvas [outside the building] in primitive colours was a life-size portrait of the Elephant Man. This very crude production depicted a frightful creature that could only have been possible in a nightmare. It was the figure of a man with the characteristics of an elephant. The transfiguration was not far advanced. There was still more of the man than of the beast. This fact – that it was still human – was the most repellent attribute of the creature. There was nothing about it of the pitiableness of the misshapened or the deformed, nothing of the grotesqueness of the freak, but merely the loathing insinuation of a man being changed into an animal.⁴⁶

Treves goes on to write of how, when he secured a private viewing, he found 'the creature' huddling to 'warm itself'. The 'hunched-up figure was the embodiment of loneliness'. When the showman (Tom Norman), 'speaking as if to a dog', commanded his exhibit to stand up,

> [t]he thing arose slowly and let the blanket that covered its head and back fall to the ground. There stood revealed the most disgusting specimen of humanity that I have ever seen ... at no time had I met with such a degraded or perverted version of a human being as this lone figure displayed. (p.191)

Treves's description of the man who would come under his care contains mixed animal metaphors, as if further to demonstrate the confusion of classification: Merrick's right arm 'suggested the limb of the subject of elephantiasis', his right hand 'was large and clumsy – a fin or paddle rather than a hand', and '[f]rom the chest hung a bag of ... repulsive
flesh ... like a dewlap suspended from the neck of a lizard' (p.192). Treves would refer to one of Merrick's keepers as 'the vampire showman' (p.200). His assertion that Merrick had been 'housed like a wild beast' (p.194) and 'dragged from town to town and from fair to fair as if he were a strange beast in a cage', exposed in his 'nakedness and hideous deformities' to a 'gaping crowd who greeted him with such mutterings as "Oh! what a horror! What a beast!"' (p.198), made more poignant the 'overwhelming tragedy of his life', the full extent of which Treves only realised 'when I came to know that Merrick was highly intelligent, that he possessed an acute sensibility and – worse than all – a romantic imagination' (p.194). The description may recall Frankenstein's monster.

According to Treves's record, a further change in Merrick's condition occurred, and it is one whose cause reinforces gender stereotypes. Although Treves suggests that Merrick had an idealised view of women, it is he himself who demonstrates one. When 'a friend of mine, a young and pretty widow' accepts Treves's invitation to 'enter Merrick's room with a smile, wish him good morning and shake him by the hand', the effect upon Merrick, who 'told me afterwards that this was the first woman who had ever smiled at him, and the first woman, in the whole of his life, who had shaken hands with him', is such that '[f]rom this day the transformation of Merrick commenced and he began to change, little by little, from a hunted thing into a man' (p.202).

Another agent of transformation in Merrick's life was, of course, Treves himself, who, by his own account, rescued his patient from a life of vagabondage:

> he had been moving on and moving on all his life. He knew no other state of existence. To him it was normal. He had passed from the workhouse to the hospital, from the hospital back to the workhouse, then from this town to that town or from one showman's caravan to another. He had never known a home nor any semblance of one. He had no possessions. His sole belongings, beside his clothes and some books, were the monstrous cap and the cloak. He was a wanderer, a pariah and an outcast. That his quarters at the hospital were his for life he could not understand. (pp.199–200)

Like Merrick, Harkness's midget is exhibited for curious paying audiences, but dressed so that he can play Napoleon.

Lobe 'loved his Whitechapel people' (IDL, p.19), but found that '[m]onstrosities were a trial to his faith'. He does not want to place himself above God by turning away from them in disgust, but admits 'I feel all of a creep. I wonder if they're men or beasts!' The midget is, he
knows, a man, ‘and yet *he* feels himself to be a missing link or something’ (IDL, p.21). Lobe resolves to ask the general’s advice.

The ‘monstrosities’ function here in typical fashion: they force
inspection of the states between which they lie (which, of course, is also
a function of travel). In Harkness’s novel they direct attention to the
social poles associated with humanity and bestiality. Thus,

[t]here is in every one of us a deeply seated love of cruelty for its own sake, although the refined only show it by stinging words and cutting remarks. So let no one think the scum worse than the rest. The scum is brutal, the refined is vicious. (IDL, p.21)

Going through ‘some of the worst streets in the metropolis’, Lobe finds
himself in a square into which, at midnight,

the public-houses that flanked its entrance vomited forth their cargoes of
depravity and vice, and the air rang with the oaths of women who sell their
babies for two shillings or eighteen pence, and with the curses of men lower
than the beasts but for the gift of speech. (IDL, p.24)

Amongst those public-houses ‘congregated the lowest dregs of the East
End populace’, ready to rob drunken sailors, who would be lured by
a ‘vampire dressed in a gaudy skirt’ (IDL, p.24). Harkness does not,
as some authors of the time do, wholly detach the observer from the
observed. She emphasises social connections in her writing, and social
movement reveals the unsettledness. As in *The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde* and Henry James’s *Washington Square* (1880), there is a
sense of social character changing:

Legend says that years gone by the square was inhabited by ‘real gentry.’ ‘Middling folks’ live in it at present – people who own small factories or large shops, who are in trades or business. These ‘middling folks’ talk of the ‘lower classes’, and it is difficult to say whereabouts in the social scale ‘middling folks’ come exactly. Certainly the upper ten have nothing to do with them … It suffices to say that ‘middling folks’ bestow old clothes and soup on ‘the poorer classes,’ just as ‘the real, gentry’ visit ‘the deserving poor’ when down in the country, and give donations to charities during the season in London. (IDL, pp.24–25)

The changing relationships and the inadequacy of part-time charity both
suggest the dislocation that needs to be fixed. In this place, within a
room close to the roof in a house on the right-hand side of the square
lives Ruth, an orphan, who has been brought up by her father’s foreman.
The latter was made, by her father’s will, sole trustee of his property on
condition that he look after her. At the age of eighteen, Ruth was to
inherit her father's business: Weldon & Co.'s cocoa-nut chip factory.

Lobe wonders about Ruth joining the Salvation Army – ‘These slum
saviours were of all classes ... and worked day and night among the
scum of London’ (*IDL*, p.31) – but thinks she is too young and delicate
(*IDL*, p.33). Nevertheless, Ruth decides that she wishes to dedicate herself
to the Army’s service (*IDL*, p.42), though she will later be told by the
Salvation Army superintendent James Cooke that she should sort out her
problems with her trustee, Mr Pember (later called by the narrator ‘the
serpent’ [*IDL*, p.101], before she can become a slum saviour [*IDL*, pp.85,
87]). Questioning other female workers, she is told of the conditions
faced by themselves and the people they help. They receive the worst
treatment not from men, but from women, who ‘are more like demons
than human beings’ (*IDL*, p.45). Juxtaposition again underpins the
reality and enables the moral:

> I have worked in Whitechapel, but I have never seen anything to equal what
> I see in these streets. And what makes it so terrible to me is the fact that,
> not a mile away, people are enjoying every luxury. This whole slum could
> be cleared away in a fortnight if people had a mind to do it. (*IDL*, p.45)

So says the eldest of the ‘slum saviours’ who instructs Ruth. The younger
remarks on the lack of Christian principles demonstrated by the local
rich, who do not feed, drink, clothe, or visit the poor. Her statement
that ‘[a]nimals could teach the people about here many a lesson’ seems
directed at those who live in filth, ‘[b]ut, then, how can one tell these
people that they ought to keep clean when they are starving?’ (*IDL*,
p.45) The idea of animals educating people illustrates my argument:
in literature and other cultural forms of the time beastly avatars assist
contemporaries’s recognition of, and attempts to, understand social and
intellectual movements.

Harkness’s treatment of those who ‘sink into the scum of London’
is remarkable. She does not recoil from their persons so much as from
the system that has made them thus. When she commands her readers
to ‘[l]ook at the thousands of men [at the dock gates] who fight for
work, who struggle like wild beasts for the contractors’ tickets’, she
also instructs us to ‘[r]emember that a million men throughout the
United Kingdom are out of work’. At the same time, she warns of the
consequences of not working to improve the situation. She notes that
while other people assume they have soldiers and policemen to protect
them, they are unaware that ‘policemen went in the dark hours of the
night to a well-known Socialist, and begged him to take part in their
last demonstration' and forget that 'soldiers are beginning to ask, "What will become of me when my short period of service is over and I leave the army?"" These people do not want to be conscious of the dangers open to themselves from the large army of the unemployed; from the

seething mass of discontent that is even now undermining the whole of society. Only those who go amongst them, who know them intimately, are aware of the bitter hatred which they express for 'the upper classes,' the angry feelings which they smother while ladies and gentlemen roll by in carriages. (IDL, p.55)

A more optimistic vision of the relationship between the classes is presented when the lady who has acknowledged the 'midget' is taken by Lobe once more to visit him. Asked if she thinks he has a soul, because he is 'afraid of coming here again as a dog or something', she replies that he should not be afraid:

> Things are changing fast. Social conditions are becoming different. Barriers are breaking down, and classes are amalgamating. By the time you come back all men will be brethren ... People will put you first then, if you come into the world handicapped. (IDL, pp.65-66)

Assured by her kiss, the 'midget' feels that he must be a man and have a soul: she would not have kissed him were he a missing link. Harkness combines a humanist response with a call for material change. When her narrator describes the 'human insects' (IDL, p.69) that swarm around the poor district, there is not the same contempt, resignation, or distancing that is a feature of naturalistic writing of the time. Rather, the concern is to remedy the social system that has rendered them less or other than human. True, they are still described in animalistic terms, but the clear message is that in order to prevent the damaging effects of further transformations of people, the social structure and social attitudes must be changed. It is a message that is underlined by the sympathetic doctor who forsook a future in the West End with a name for himself in order to help those starving in the East End, to which he has now become tied, 'a modern Prometheus, bound to the rock by the woes of his fellow-men' (IDL, p.75). The doctor quotes Engels on the condition of the poor and says were he younger, he would enter politics and be 'a constitutional socialist, using all lawful means to improve the condition of the working man' (IDL, p.77). He thinks that '[t]he West End is bad, or mad; not to see that if things go on like this we must have a revolution' (IDL, p.154); that the people of the East End, where everyone is starving, will one day 'walk westwards, cutting throats and
hurling brickbats, until they are shot down by the military'. He refers dismissively to the 'pretty stories about the East End made up by Walter Besant' (IDL, p.154) that people prefer to read rather than hear the truth, but if they ignore the latter, they will be in danger.

Similarly, Jane Hardy – the labour-mistress at Ruth's factory – tells her of her Socialist sympathies when Ruth reports for work. Animal imagery is used once again to convey the point as she remarks of the girls who work there that '[t]he best thing that could happen to [them] just now would be a leetle pressure of the finger and thumb on the windpipe when they're just born, and don't feel any more than young kittens' (IDL, p.92). There are, she believes, 'too many of 'em, and they only add to competition, which, as the Socialists say, is playing the devil with us at present' (IDL, p.92). Her attitude may not carry absolute authorial or even narrative endorsement – she believes in ‘combination, fighting the upper classes, and justice' (IDL, p.90) – but has to put her principles in her pocket as she has her mother to keep and will ‘never take on a Jewess', because '[t]he East End is just overrun with foreign people, and that makes matters worse for us English' (IDL, p.95). Her hatred of capitalists seems focused on Mr Pember, whom she might have loved, but who withdrew once he saw that he was dear to her and whom she now blames for her childlessness (p.140). Yet the condition of the miserable girls, whom Ruth encounters 'jabbering and scolding like young magpies' (IDL, p.90), is one that requires remedy: 'They had only just escaped from the Board school; but many of them had faces wise with wickedness, and eyes out of which all traces of maidenhood had vanished' (IDL, p.90). They work standing from seven in the morning till seven at night for half a crown a week and without holidays (IDL, p.98). Jane Hardy's comment to Ruth – '[y]ou can't form an opinion about the hands ... until you have witnessed their environment' (IDL, p.107) – might just as well be uttered by Harkness to her readers. Hardy's acknowledgement of their social conditions and personal situation entails an understanding of prostitution: 'Virtue is easy enough when a woman has plenty to eat, and a character to keep, but it's quite a different thing when a girl is starving' (IDL, p.113). Harkness declines to blame people for circumstances over which they have no control. If they are brutalised by their life, they are not themselves wholly at fault, though she does not entirely absolve them from personal responsibility. Again, animal imagery conveys this point as we are told that at the docks people would sometimes say to Lobe 'it's just no good, Salvation ... I can't get no work, so I may as well make a beast of myself, and forget God made a man
of me at the beginning' (IDL, p.145). They repent, but are hopeless cases once drink gets hold of them (pp.145–146) and come 'to take pleasure in their filthy existence' (p.171).

By contrast, the Jews 'had not the down-trodden look of our Gentile population, which, seems to enjoy crouching and whining instead of asserting itself with sturdy independence'. They have 'long-suffering faces, but they have hope written on their features instead of that despair which seems to sodden English East End men and women' (IDL, pp.166–167). Their religiousness and sense of community seem to account for this: 'Charity offers him [the Jew] no premium for idleness; so the chosen people hang together, the rich help the poor, and every Jew finds a friend on the Jewish Board of Guardians' (IDL, p.167). Harkness is engaged here in her own effort of transformation, aiming to counter negative stereotypes of the Jew. Her purpose becomes clearer still when her narrator presents the death-bed confession of a blood-thirsty slaughterhouse man who murdered a woman and then, a Gentile, hid among the Jews (pp.168–169). Although the man confesses to having murdered only one woman, it seems plain that Harkness intends to challenge anti-Semitic views of Jack the Ripper as a Jew. (The Ripper's murders took place in the second half of the year in which the novel is set – the year before the book's publication. There is also a suggestion that the continual slaughtering of beasts made the man like a cannibal, thirsting for human blood.)

After the death of 'Napoleon the midget', Lobe and the lady who had visited the deceased discuss Socialism. The lady tells him: 'I believe in the principles of Socialism; but, like every one else, I get tired of seeing so little accomplished' (IDL, p.129). She is unimpressed by the inability of Socialists to work together, but sees that '[s]ocialism is growing every day' and believes that '[a]t present its most hopeful sign is an embryonic labour-party' (IDL, p.132).

The doctor despises social climbing, which 'always ends in moral degradation'. He would 'rather be fettered to the people with iron chains, than wear the gilded livery of a West End physician' (p.157). It is more important to him that one should do real work and leave one's mark than be talked about.

Harkness resists the false comfort of the pastoral. When thousands of people travel by train to Kent for hop-picking,

[t]hey are ... cheaper to carry about than dumb beasts, for they can be packed closer together, and if one or two are suffocated on the journey no one claims damages ... the death of a hop picker matters to no one. (IDL, p.171)
Once picking, though in better spirits, ‘their conversation was about the last East End murder, and their songs had the filthiest choruses; nature did not purify their thoughts, as Captain Lobe had expected ...’ (IDL, p.181).

The people are ‘more like beasts than human beings’; ‘[t]hey come out of the holes they call homes, and the public-houses, to enjoy themselves in truly bestial fashion’ (IDL, p.196). It is a slum saviour who interrupts their ‘woman-baiting’ to remind them ‘[y]ou are men and women, you are not wild beasts’ (IDL, p.200), telling them to go home and not kill the half-naked woman whom they are taunting and manhandling.

## Sordid struggle

In George Gissing’s *The Nether World* (1889), bestiality is linked to both class and race. The narrator tells us of the protagonist, Clem Peckover, that

> the broad joviality with which she gloated over the prospect of cruelties shortly to be inflicted, put her at once on a par with the noble savage running wild in woods. Civilisation could bring no charge against this young woman; it and she had no common criterion.⁴⁷

Clem is described as ‘showing really remarkable skill in conveying pieces of sausage to her mouth by means of the knife alone’ and possessing ‘Red Indian scent’ that allows her to detect others’ feelings (p.7). The racialised foreignness of aspects of her appearance also introduces temporal difference: ‘Her forehead was low and of great width; her nose was well shapen, and had large sensual apertures; her cruel lips may be seen on certain fine antique busts’ (p.8). The animality equates to a loss of femininity: ‘Clem would have liked dealing with some one with whom she could try savage issue in real tooth-and-claw conflict’ (p.8). Later, we are told of her ‘savage kind of admiration’ for Bob Hewett (p.36).

Travel, such as it exists for creatures like those in Morrison’s, Harkness’s, and Gissing’s novels, is rarely voluntary. They have little choice but to obey the natural forces of their environment — in this case, economic forces. A famous example from across the Atlantic is Theodore Dreiser’s *Sister Carrie* (1900), the beginning of which has its central character, Carrie Meeber, going by train to Chicago — a city whose ‘many and growing commercial opportunities gave it widespread fame which made of it a giant magnet, drawing to itself from all quarters the hopeful and the hopeless’, with the metaphor of the magnet forcing the idea of a lack of free will or resistance.⁴⁸ Chicago pulls people in from the Midwest and
beyond. In most of the texts with which *Beastly Journeys* is concerned, the bulk of the characters are already resident in their environs and have little hope of escape. Usually, they are part of a swarm or crowd or (in the Jago) they hunt in packs or fight territorial or kinship battles. In *The Nether World*, for example, John Hewett exclaims:

> If any man had said as much as a rough word to me, I'd a gone at him like a bulldog. I felt like a beast. I wanted to fight, I tell you – to fight till the life was kicked an' throttled out of me! (p.22)

When the characters in these novels do journey as individuals it is along routes prescribed to their kind, so that they act instinctively and with little or no free will. For such beasts, transformation is impossible: they possess neither the means nor the stimulus. The only options are stasis or further degeneration, which latter is a matter of degree rather than an alteration of form.

Gissing's narrator shows glimpses of their humanity. When he does so, it is in the context of momentary release from thralldom. Thus,

> [i]t was the hour of the unyoking of men. In the highways and byways of Clerkenwell there was a thronging of released toilers, of young and old, of male and female. Forth they streamed from factories and workrooms, anxious to make the most of the few hours during which they might live for themselves. (p.10)

The lack of leisure time is reflected in the common linguistic reduction of the workers to the useful parts of their body: their designation as 'hands'. Gissing writes: 'Wealth inestimable is ever flowing through these workshops, and the hands that have been stained with gold-dust may, as likely as not, some day extend themselves in petition for a crust' (p.11). Through striking images such as these, Gissing communicates the cost of having such people service our society. Just as in Wells's *The Time Machine* (which we shall examine in Chapter Three), the brutish Morlocks (the descendants of the proletariat and subterranean toilers) labour for the comfort of the Eloi (the descendants of the middle- and upper-classes), so the denizens of the Nether World, with little scope for their own enjoyment, produce the wealth that benefits others, then as now. Sprinkling the metaphor of gold dust and letting it fall in contrast with the basic necessity of a piece of bread, Gissing juxtaposes the two classes and makes the connections that are normally kept hidden shockingly evident. In the Nether World of Clerkenwell, not only the people but even the buildings themselves suggest the 'sordid struggle for existence' (p.51). External conditions and, in some, instincts that a
more comfortable existence might keep in check combine to effect the
degradation of the people who live there. Thus, for example, we are told
of Clara, in relation to Sidney Kirkwood:

The disease inherent in her being, that deadly outcome of social tyranny
which perverts the generous elements of youth into mere seeds of destruction,
developed day by day, blighting her heart, corrupting her moral sense, even
setting marks of evil upon the beauty of her countenance ... Like a creature
that is beset by unrelenting forces, she summoned and surveyed all the crafty
faculties lurking in the dark places of her nature; theoretically she had now
accepted every debasing compact by which a woman can spite herself on the
world's injustices. Self-assertion; to be no longer an unregarded atom in the
mass of those who are born only to labour for others; to find play for the
strength and the passion which, by no choice of her own, distinguished her
from the tame slave. (p.86)

Beyond the question of the character transformations (or lack of
opportunity to bring about change) is the role of the author. In John
Goode's words: 'Gissing is a novelist: that is, he is a specific kind of
literary producer, transforming specific material in determined conditions
of production.'⁴⁹ Goode makes the important point that Gissing does
not simply represent what he sees. Rather, as a writer, he undertakes work
that employs genre to mutate London life into fiction that is informed
by ideology and material conditions. This is true not only of Gissing,
but of all literary realists, and not only of all literary realists, but of all
writers. We need more reminding of the fact with realists, because they
purport to show life as it really is. As Goode implies, with Gissing there
is even more of a temptation to think so, because his gritty portraits
are unalleviated by sentimentalism or plot twists that detract from the
sense of fidelity to life.⁵⁰ Sloan may be right to claim of Gissing that
'[t]he brutal accuracy of his account of working-class life in Clerkenwell
introduced a new kind of realism to the English public',⁵¹ but Goode
reminds us that the absence of sentimentality and contrivance does
not mean a lack of mediation. Indeed, the author's social position and
ideology need more attention. In Gissing, as with other realist and
naturalistic authors, the narrator observes a distance between himself (it
usually is a he) and his characters. That gap allows the narrator to rise
above the animal condition of his subjects. Whether that distance marks
a contradiction and flaw in the view of an overarching determinism or
whether it grants an external position from which one can view and
criticise the circumstances on display is a question that has been debated
in studies of naturalism.
## The Minotaur and the frightened lambs

It is in the context of women's propulsion into the economic realm that W. T. Stead's exposé of child prostitution should be seen. Against the background of thwarted proposals to raise the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen and scandals such as the uncovering in 1882 and farcical prosecution in 1885 of Mrs Jefferies for running brothels that catered for wealthy and celebrated clients,⁵² Stead 'decided to prove that children could be bought and sent into enforced prostitution by doing it himself'.⁵³ Having been introduced by Benjamin Waugh to a seven-year-old and a four-year-old girl, both of whom had been lured into brothels and raped, Stead determined to act and use his newspaper for the cause.⁵⁴ He recruited Rebecca Jarrett, a 'reformed prostitute, brothel keeper and procuress',⁵⁵ to obtain a girl for him. With the help of her old friend Nancy Broughton, Jarrett bought thirteen-year-old Eliza Armstrong for five pounds, had her virginity confirmed by a doctor, and had her taken to France. A good part of the horror of Stead's report lay in the commoditisation of girls. Stead's monster is the Minotaur. Invoking classical Greece, Stead recalls the myth of how Athens was compelled to send to Crete every nine years seven youths and seven maidens, all of whom 'were flung into the famous Labyrinth of Daedalus, there to wander about blindly until such time as they were devoured by the Minotaur, a frightful monster, half man, half bull, the foul product of an unnatural lust'.⁵⁶ From Ancient Greece Stead switches his gaze to modern London, where '[t]his very night ... and every night, year in and year out, not seven maidens only, but many times seven ... will be offered up as the Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon'. They were maidens this morning, but tomorrow 'will find themselves within ... the maze of London brotheland'. Developing his classical metaphor for rhetorical and social impact, Stead continues: 'The maw of the London Minotaur is insatiable.' Yet London, Stead claims, does not care for the fate of its 50,000 prostitutes. Stead is 'not without hope that there may be some check placed upon this vast tribute of maidens ... which is nightly levied in London by the vices of the rich upon the necessities of the poor' (I, p.2), but he asks that if the sacrifice of maidenhood must continue, its victims should at least be of an age at which they can understand their situation and loss and therefore sacrifice willingly, rather than through coercion or ignorance:

> That is surely not too much to ask from the dissolute rich. Even considerations of self-interest might lead our rulers to assent to so modest a demand.
For the hour of Democracy has struck, and there is no wrong which a man resents like this ... the fathers and brothers whose daughters and sisters are purchased like slaves, not for labour, but from lust, are now at last enrolled among the governing classes – a circumstance full of hope for the nation, but by no means without menace for a class ... unless the levying of the maiden tribute in London is shorn of its worst abuses ... resentment, which might be appeased by reform, may hereafter be the virus of a social revolution. It is the one explosive which is strong enough to wreck the Throne. (I, p.2)

Distinguishing between sexual immorality and sexual criminality, Stead makes clear that his concern is with the latter, which he classifies as follows:

I. The sale and purchase and violation of children.

II. The procuration of virgins.

III. The entrapping and ruin of women.

IV. The international slave trade in girls.

V. Atrocities, brutalities, and unnatural crimes. (I, p.2)

Explaining that he writes from personal knowledge, Stead describes how he spent four weeks with two or three coadjutors 'oscillat[ing] between the noblest and the meanest of mankind, the savours and the destroyers of their race, spending hours alternately in brothels and hospitals, in the streets and in refuges, in the company of procuresses and of bishops'. This 'strange, inverted world ... was the same, yet not the same, as the world of business and the world of politics' (I, p.2). At best, one wanders in a Circe's isle,

[b]ut with a difference, for whereas the enchanted in olden time had the heads and the voices and the bristles of swine, while the heart of a man was in them still, these have not put on in outward form 'the inglorious likeness of a beast,' but are in semblance as other men, while within there is only the heart of a beast - bestial, ferocious, and filthy beyond the imagination of decent men. (I, p.3)

Stead recounts his discovery of a former brothel-keeper who proves to him that she can procure girls - including a thirteen-year-old - for three pounds. He does not proceed with the transaction, but has a 'thoroughly trustworthy woman' go with the ex-brothel-keeper to a 'bad house' where a girl is purchased for two pounds plus a sovereign when she is proved a virgin. The girl, grown nervous and suspicious when told she will be taken to the country, escapes (I, p.5).

Class is a factor throughout. The former brothel-keeper has told Stead that '[p]retty girls who are poor, and who have either no parents or are
away from home, are easiest picked up' (I, p.4). Stead relates how, though he has been inquiring in the East End, he learns of a house in the West End 'kept apparently by a highly respectable midwife, where children were taken by procurers to be certified as virgins before violation, and where, after violation, they were taken to be "patched up", and where, if necessary, abortion could be procured'. The house stands 'imperturbably respectable in its outward appearance, apparently an indispensable adjunct of modern civilization, its experienced proprietress maintaining confidential relations with the "best houses" in the West-end'. The proprietress says, 'Oh, Mr. — is a gentleman who has a great penchant for little girls. I do not know how many I have had to repair after him' (I, p.5). The discrepancy between the respectable exterior and disreputable interior is the architectural equivalent of the condition symbolised by Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and signifies a duality that runs through so many narratives of these years. 'Anything can be done for money, if you only know where to take it' (I, p.6), writes Stead in a comment that testifies to the power that has transformed the state of things and contributed to the disparity between social exterior and inner secret.

Stead tells the tale of thirteen-year-old Lily (Eliza), who was sold by her alcoholic parents for three pounds, plus two pounds to be paid once her virginity was certified. Taken to 'a house of ill-fame', she is put to bed, drugged, and locked in with her purchaser. After a short silence 'there rose a wild and piteous cry – not a loud shriek, but a helpless, startled scream like the bleat of a frightened lamb' (I, p.6). This scene, Stead writes, occurred in a 'well-known house, within a quarter of a mile of Oxford Circus' (II, p.1). Stead deplores the fact that a child becomes a woman at thirteen in the eyes of the law and can dispose of her virtue then, three years before she can dispose of other valuables (II, p.1). He is appalled by the ignorance of the girls: 'It is one of the greatest scandals of Protestant training that parents are allowed to keep their children in total ignorance of the simplest truths of physiology, without even a rudimentary conception of the nature of sexual morality' (II, p.2). His simile of the lamb evokes a Christ-like innocence and sacrifice, while casting himself as protector.

Stead relates his dealings with the outwardly respectable Miss X and Miss Z, whose 'systematized business' is the procuring of virgins (II, p.3). From Miss Z, Stead solicits a virgin of around fourteen-years-old for five pounds plus a doctor's fee. He is told by Miss X and Miss Z that one of their friends, an unnamed doctor, takes three girls (age sixteen or over) for his own use each fortnight at between five pounds and seven
pounds a night. From these two women, Stead orders five virgins to distribute among his friends for five pounds a head, plus doctor's fees. He is brought nine girls, four of whom a doctor (in whom Stead has confided) certifies as virgins.

Reporting the rarity of street girls under thirteen and his own inability to obtain a prostitute under that age, though 'there is no doubt as to the existence of a vast and increasing mass of juvenile prostitution' (III, p.2), Stead calls for the raising of the age of consent to sixteen. At a villa in North London he is shown a young-looking fourteen-year-old, in whom there 'still lingered the timid glance of a frightened fawn'. And he is told of 'a monster now walking about who acts as a clerk in a highly respectable establishment' (III, p.2). The clerk is fifty-years-old and has ruined children for years, but cannot be prosecuted, because the girls are thirteen-years-old.

Stead writes that:

> I have at this moment an agreement with the keeper of one of the houses
> near Regent Street to the effect that she will have ready in her house, within
> a few hours of receipt of a line from me, a girl under fourteen.

He tells the story of Emily, 'a child-prostitute who, at the age of eleven, had for two years been earning her living by vice in the East-end' and explains that, legally, abduction is only an offence if a girl is in the custody of her father at the time of her abduction (III, p.3).

Class scandal again rears its head when Stead mentions a brothel in St. John's Wood, which is rumoured to be patronised by 'at least one Prince and one Cabinet Minister' (8 July, p.5). And he refers to a '[w]althy Mr. —', whose 'whole life is dedicated to the gratification of lust' and whose name he constantly came across '[d]uring my investigations in the subterranean realm'. It was 'actually Mr. —'s boast that he has ruined 2,000 women in his time' (III, p.5).

It is an inverted world that Stead exposes; and one in which the police cannot be trusted. Stead's weeks of night-prowling have convinced him that talk of the scandalous state of the streets is greatly exaggerated. Indeed, he records his 'respect and admiration for the extraordinarily good behaviour of the English girls who pursue this dreadful calling' (IV, p.3). The Criminal Law Amendment Bill was passed in August 1885, but Stead was charged with, and found guilty of, abduction, because Liza's step-father had not given his permission for his daughter to be taken. He was also found guilty of assault and sentenced to three months' imprisonment.
## Man monster

The bestial epithets attached to Jack the Ripper are the least surprising of the cases presented in this chapter. Combining animality with race and vampirism, *The Star* described the Ripper as ‘half-beast, half-man’; a ‘ghoul-like creature who stalks through the streets of London, stalking down his victim like a Pawnee Indian ... [who] is simply drunk with blood, and he will have more’.⁵⁷ Judith Walkowitz reproduces an illustrated page of the *Police Illustrated News* for 17 November 1888 that reports ‘THE SEVENTH HORRIBLE MURDER BY THE MONSTER OF THE EAST-END’⁵⁸ and she also quotes from the *Daily Telegraph* of 14 September 1888, which referred to the ‘man monster who stalks the streets in search of fallen women’.⁵⁹ Walkowitz cites contemporary reports linking the Ripper with a Gothic creature, werewolf, and vampire, ogres and monsters.⁶⁰ According to Walkowitz, the murders ‘triggered off a set of psychosexual and political fears that resounded, in different ways, across the social spectrum’.⁶¹ To be triggered, those fears had to be already present and primed. Walkowitz goes on to apply an analysis based on postmodern theories of fragmentation and the body,⁶² but she finds the origin of those fears in movements and divisions of the fin de siècle. Observing of the capital that ‘[t]he opposition of East and West increasingly took on imperial and racial dimensions, as the two parts of London imaginatively doubled for England and its Empire’, she notes that at the end of the nineteenth century, ‘journalistic exposés highlighted this geographic segregation, impressing on Londoners the perception that they lived in a city of contrasts, a class and geographically divided metropolis of hovels and palaces’.⁶³ At the time, the Ripper murders could be ‘shaped ... into a story of class conflict and exploitation’,⁶⁴ as suspicions about the murderer’s identity ‘shifted from the East End to the West End’ and ‘representations of the Ripper oscillated from an externalized version of the Other to a variation of the multiple, divided Self’.⁶⁵ In fact, writes Walkowitz, it was Stead who was the first journalist to notice the sexual origins of the murders, to make comparisons with Stevenson’s *The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde* (1886), and to suggest, after first assuming that the murderer belonged to the slums, that the Ripper, who had an uncontrolled sexual appetite for blood, may be of a more ‘respectable’ station.⁶⁶ Because of their context, the killings are emblematic of the contrasts, juxtapositions, and encounters that characterise representations of the 1880s and 1890s. Whitechapel, as Walkowitz and others note, was an impoverished area
on the edge of the East End, but adjacent to the financial district, the City, and accessible from the West End. Indeed, its working-class entertainments attracted rich young men from the West End, who enjoyed what we would now call 'slumming'.⁶⁷ It is eastward through 'this grey, monstrous London of ours, with its myriads of people, its sordid sinners, and its splendid sins' that Wilde's Dorian Gray heads, 'soon losing my way in a labyrinth of grimy streets and black, grassless squares' before he reaches the 'absurd little theatre' at which he sees and is drawn to young actress Sibyl Vane.⁶⁸ Indeed, the *OED*'s examples of 'slumming', in the sense of visiting slums, date from the 1880s.

A point made by Walkowitz about the Ripper murders may throw further light on the significance of beastly images to those living in the late nineteenth century. She writes that:

> If, traditionally, the 'classical' body has signified the 'health' of the larger social body - of a closed, homogeneous, regulated social order - then the mounting array of 'grotesque,' mutilated corpses in this case represented the exact inverse: a visceral analogue to the epistemological incoherence and political disorientation threatening the body politic during the 'autumn of terror'.⁶⁹

Nowadays some of the horror has been lost and the ghastly misogyny of the murders has been softened by a foggy nostalgia for late Victorian London. In fact, one of the foremost Ripper authorities, Paul Begg, notes that 'very soon after the murders stopped - and probably even as they were being committed - Jack the Ripper passed through a strange transformation from real life murderer to bugaboo of nightmare'.⁷⁰ That alteration may have been a way of coping with the terror created by the figure of the Ripper himself, but perhaps lost from view to later generations is the fact that the Ripper gave 'substance and form' to contemporary fears of a 'working class uprising and revolution'. There existed, Begg reports, an anxiety that just as this brutal killer might 'move out of the warren of hovels and alleys' of the Nether World into 'the civilised city', so 'could the diseased savages themselves, espousing socialism, demanding employment and fair wages, education and acceptable housing, and bringing an end to the world as the Victorian middle classes knew it'.⁷¹ Begg quotes from George Bernard Shaw's letter to *The Star* in which Shaw suggests that the Ripper has succeeded more effectively than social reformers in drawing the attention of the wider public and press to conditions in the East End and promoting reform:

> The moral is a pretty one, and the Insurrectionists, the Dynamitards, the
Invincibles, and the extreme left of the Anarchist party will not be slow to draw it. 'Humanity, political science, economics, and religion', they will say, 'are all rot; the one argument that touches your lady and gentleman is the knife'. That is so pleasant for the party of Hope and Perseverance in their toughening struggle with the party of Desperation and Death.⁷²

Begg notes that the 'fundamental and far-reaching changes' to the 'social, political and economic structure' of the country was 'frightening' and that by the end of the decade there was a real fear of revolution. The 'social evils' of both the capital and nation 'came to be embodied by the poor, the destitute and the unemployed of the East End', and 'Jack the Ripper came to represent the East End and so to represent all the anxieties of the age.'⁷³

Despite the efforts of concerned commentators in the 1880s and 1890s to enlist sympathy for the urban underclass, the pervasiveness of pejorative animal metaphors worked against a general softening of attitudes among those who held power. Journeys into the Nether World tended (with some exceptions) to underline the distance between observer and observed. When that distance looked like being broken down, it was perceived as a threat to social or psychological stability.

In no late nineteenth-century texts are the combination of sex, bestiality, class, and capitalism more evident than in Bram Stoker's *Dracula* and Richard Marsh's *The Beetle*, to which we turn in the next chapter.

## Notes

<footnote n="1">1 On this, see, for example, Asa Briggs, *Victorian Cities* [1963] (London: Penguin, 1968).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Briggs, *Victorian Cities*, p.59.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 Raymond Williams, *The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence* [1971] (London: The Hogarth Press, 1984), p.16.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 Ben Tillett, *A Brief History of the Dockers Union* [1910], quoted in William J. Fishman, *East End 1888: A Year in a London Borough among the Labouring Poor* [2005] (Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 2009), p.24.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 Arthur Morrison, *A Child of the Jago* [1896], Peter Miles, ed. (London: Everyman, 1996), p.11.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 Beatrice Webb, *My Apprenticeship* [1926], quoted in Fishman, *East End 1888*, p.20.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 William Potter (C. Tirling), *Thomas Jackson of Whitechapel* [1929], quoted in Fishman, *East End 1888*, p.239.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Margaret Harkness (as John Law), *A City Girl* [1887], quoted in Fishman, *East End 1888*, p.250.</footnote>
9 Margaret Harkness (as John Law), *In Darkest London* [1889 as *Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army*], quoted in Fishman, *East End 1888*, p.152.

10 Fishman, *East End 1888*, p.110.

11 Anne Humpherys, 'Knowing the Victorian City: Writing and Representation', *Victorian Literature and Culture* 30, 2 (September 2002), 602.

12 David Harvey, *The Urban Experience* (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p.168.

13 Harvey, *The Urban Experience*, p.165.

14 This section revises and condenses my essay, 'Stevenson's Monkey-Business: *The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde*', in Peter Liebregts and Wim Tigges, eds, *Beauty and the Beast: Christina Rossetti, Walter Pater, R. L. Stevenson and their Contemporaries* (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), pp.157-170. See also my essay, 'White Apes at the Fin de Siècle', in Tim Youngs, ed., *Writing and Race* (London: Longman, 1997), pp.166-190.

15 Robert Louis Stevenson, 'The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde', in *Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Merry Men and Other Tales* (London: Dent, 1925), p.19. All further references to this text will be given parenthetically.

16 Gareth Stedman Jones, *Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society* [1971] (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), p.281.

17 Jones, *Outcast London*, p.281.

18 Jones, *Outcast London*, p.282.

19 Jones, *Outcast London*, p.284.

20 Jones, *Outcast London*, p.289.

21 Jones, *Outcast London*, p.290.

22 Jones, *Outcast London*, p.291. Smith's warning is from his article, 'Industrial Training of Destitute Children', published in *Contemporary Review* in January 1885.

23 Karl Beckson, *London in the 1890s: A Cultural History* (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1992), p.18.

24 'The transformation of peasant Paddy into an ape-man or simianized Caliban was completed by the 1860s and 1870s.' See L. Perry Curtis, *Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature* (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1971), p.2.

25 Jones, *Outcast London*, p.285.

26 Jones, *Outcast London*, p.285.

27 This paragraph was drawn from Jones, *Outcast London*, pp.286-287. Jones illustrates the idea of the proliferation of the unfit, with reference to Arnold White's *The Problems of a Great City* [1887].

28 Jones, *Outcast London*, p.308.

29 David Punter, *The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day* (London: Longman 1996), p.1.

30 Punter, *Literature of Terror*, p.3.

31 See William Veeder, 'Collated Fractions of the Manuscript Drafts of *Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde*', in William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch, eds, *Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde after One Hundred Years* (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1988), p.22.

32 Helen Merrell Lynd, *England in the Eighteen-Eighties: Toward a Social Basis for Freedom* (London: Oxford University Press, 1945), p.44.

33 Lynd, *The Eighteen-Eighties*, p.45.

34 See Veeder, 'Collated Fractions', pp.34-35.

35 Patrick Brantlinger and Richard Boyle, 'The Education of Edward Hyde: Stevenson's
"Gothic Gnome" and the Mass Readership of Late-Victorian England', in Veeder
and Hirsch, eds, *Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde after One Hundred Years*, pp.265–282.

36 Brantlinger and Boyle, 'The Education of Edward Hyde', p.272.

37 Brantlinger and Boyle, 'The Education of Edward Hyde', p.266.

38 Andrew Lang, 'Mr. Stevenson's Works', in *Essays in Little* (London: Henry and Co., 1891), p.35.

39 Peter Miles, 'Introduction', in Arthur Morrison, *A Child of the Jago* [1896], Peter Miles, ed. (London: Everyman, 1996), p.xliv.

40 Miles, 'Introduction', p.xliii.

41 Miles, 'Introduction', p. xxxvii.

42 Bernard Shaw, 'Preface: Mainly About Myself', in *Plays Unpleasant: Widowers' Houses, The Philanderer, Mrs. Warren's Profession* (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946), pp.25–26. The preface was written in 1898.

43 Kevin R. Swafford, 'Translating the Slums: The Coding of Criminality and the Grotesque in Arthur Morrison’s “A Child of the Jago”', *The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association* 35, 2: *Translating in and across Cultures* (Autumn 2002), 53.

44 Shaw, 'Preface', p.27.

45 Margaret Harkness, *In Darkest London* (Cambridge: Black Apollo Press, 2003), pp.15–16. First published as John Law, *Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army* (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1889). The novel is set in 1888, though p.132 mistakenly suggests 1886. Further page references will be given parenthetically as *IDL*.

46 From Treves's essay 'The Elephant Man', published in his 1923 book *The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences*, reproduced in Michael Howell and Peter Ford, *The True History of the Elephant Man* (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), pp.190–210, quoted at p.190. Further page references will be given in the text.

47 George Gissing, *The Nether World* [1889], edited with an introduction by Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p.6. Further page references will be given parenthetically.

48 Theodore Dreiser, *Sister Carrie* [1900] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p.16.

49 John Goode, *George Gissing: Ideology and Fiction* (London: Vision, 1978), p.14.

50 John Sloan also notes that: 'The novel [*The Nether World*] is completely free of the sentimentalising strain which we find in the “industrial novel” of the 1840s and 1850s, and indeed to some extent in Gissing’s own earlier novels on the condition of the people. Absent too is any representative middle-class character through whom the novel might hold out a consolatory vision of refuge or retreat.' See John Sloan, *George Gissing: The Cultural Challenge* (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p.76.

51 Sloan, *George Gissing*, p.76.

52 Jefferies, whose activities had been uncovered in 1882, pleaded guilty, saving 'herself and her clients the embarrassment of being asked difficult questions. [She] was fined £200, which she paid with cash.' See Paul Begg, *Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History* (London: Longman, 2003), p.118.

53 Begg, *Jack the Ripper*, p.119. For an account of Stead's activities, see, for example, Grace Eckley, *Maiden Tribute: A Life of W. T. Stead* (Philadelphia, PA: Xlibris, 2007), especially Chapter Four.

54 Waugh was Honorary Secretary of the London Society for the Prevention of