ABSTRACT
Although Charles Darwin complained that in the decades following the publication of his theory, every version of evolutionism except his own seemed to be gaining cultural currency, 1 “Darwinism” became the general term by which evolutionary theory was referenced by the end of the nineteenth century. 2 Scholarship on Darwin’s reception in literature came out steadily throughout the twentieth century, but the 1980s witnessed a revolution in the field, with Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots (1983) demonstrating that Darwin drew on preexisting cultural tropes and storygenerating words to compose an easy-to-receive theory 3 and George Levine’s Darwin and the Novelists (1988) illustrating how Darwinism can be studied even for authors whose work preceded or lacked direct reference to Darwin’s. By this point, Darwin reputedly has been written about more than any other scientist, and perhaps more than any other English figure except Shakespeare. 4
And yet studies of Darwin and Anthony Trollope are notably lacking – regardless of whether that relationship is construed as Darwin’s direct influence on Trollope’s work, Darwinian tropes that impacted Victorian culture and thereby Trollope’s thinking, or language and thought processes shared in common by Darwin and Trollope as members of the same cultural moment. By far the most substantial and significant work on Trollope and Darwin is George Levine’s chapter entitled “The Darwinian World of Anthony Trollope” in his brilliant and influential Darwin and the Novelists . Levine takes Trollope as representative of mainstream Victorian realism in his gradualism and uniformitarianism, his scientific method of building narrative inductively based on detailed observation, his avoidance of generalization in favor of the specificity of the individual case, his promotion of hard work and persistence over chance and speculation, and what Levine sees as his essential conservatism. All of these traits, he argues, are also Darwinian. 5
Keep in mind that Levine’s Darwin and the Novelists was published in 1988. That makes over twenty-five years of no important contributions to the study of Darwin and Trollope. So much excellent work has been done in the past few decades presenting an increasingly complex and intellectually engaged understanding of Trollope, especially in relation to gender and imperial politics. Studies of Trollope and the burgeoning and influential scientific culture of the day must follow, given the increasing importance of the study of science in relation to literature and culture, and this essay is a step toward that end.
