ABSTRACT
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novel Tarzan, originally published in 1912, is one of the most popular works of fiction ever written. Early in the story, Lord and Lady Greystoke, the ape man’s parents, are abandoned on the coast of Africa by mutinous sailors. The time is the 1880s. Lady Alice, pregnant with the boy she will not live to raise, struggles to regain her self-control. Her husband tries to comfort her, in Burroughs’ archaic but ultimately engaging prose: “Hundreds of thousands of years ago our ancestors of the dim and distant past faced the same problems which we must face, possibly in these same primeval forests. That we are here to-day evidences their victory.”
