ABSTRACT
The publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 had, of course, a marked impact on the Victorians. His fresh appraisal of evolution by the process of natural selection appealed to and sometimes appalled late nineteenth-century intellectuals and social reformers. Victorian Canadians, as intellectual historian Carl Berger has noted, ‘were not original in transposing the doctrines of biological evolution’ to account for variations in the social structure of society. Athleticism in the public schools of Victorian and Edwardian Britain represented in part a ‘fusion of ideals;’ traditional Christian motives existed in conjunction with Darwinian effect. The cruel and sadistic treatment of boys by boys at Britain’s public schools has been well-documented by Mangan. While from available accounts, occurrences were less severe and less numerous than those in Britain, incidents of cruelty were to be found in Canadian schools.
