1 Introduction

Notes 1 Introduction 1 Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.), Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 142. 2 Oscar Wilde qtd in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 517. 3 In his letter, Wilde exaggerates his own status in Nordau’s study: the connec- tion between an artistic temperament and insanity was well-established, Wilde claimed, with ‘Professor Nordau in his book on “Degenerescence” published in 1894 [sic] having devoted an entire chapter to the petitioner as a specially typical example of this fatal law’ (Hart-Davis (ed.), Selected Letters, p. 142). In fact, on the 560-odd pages of Nordau’s diatribe, Wilde’s style of fashion and his prose essays are dealt with on a mere six pages (see Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York: D. Appleton, 1895), pp. 317–22). However, Wilde was certainly the most exposed of Nordau’s targets, and his highly sensationalised court case provided Nordau with an extra quantum of unsolicited fame. 4 J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman, the editors of the first book-length study on the subject, considered their collection Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) ‘an experiment in intellec- tual history’ (p. ix) and allowed their contributors relatively free creative reign in the examination of this – at the time – understudied area of research. The first monograph in the field, Daniel Pick’s magisterial Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1989) 1993), was intended as a comprehensive examination of ‘the formation and dissemination of a medico-psychiatric and natural-scientific language of degeneration’ (p. 2) in a broad pan-European context. This was quickly followed by William Greenslade’s Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), which traces the influence of degeneration theory in the works of Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Warwick Deeping and John Buchan. Knowledge of degeneration was further enhanced in 1996 by two important studies: Stephen Arata’s Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) analyses three varie- ties of decline in late-Victorian literature – national, biological and aesthetic (p. 2); Kelly Hurley’s theoretically astute The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1996) 2004) focuses on ‘the ruination of the human subject’ (p. 3) in the pages of British Gothic fiction and the writings of the degenerationists. Arata’s and Hurley’s monographs were followed by a string of important publications from the field of Gothic Studies, notably Cyndy Kay Hendershot, The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press (1998) 2001); Susan J. Navarette, The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin-de-Siècle Culture of Decadence (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1998); and Andrew Smith, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). This list of relevant criticism 219 220 Notes is indicative rather than comprehensive. For further influential contributions, see the bibliography at the end of this study and their critical inclusion in the subsequent chapters. 5 This is not to say that previous critics have not noticed the significance of the dialectical relationship between deviance and norm. Thus William Greenslade remarks: ‘“Degeneration” entails the existence of a norm from which degeneration has occurred’ (Greenslade, Degeneration, p. 29). Stephen Arata comments on the suggestiveness of Morel’s formative definition: ‘This formulation begged a number of questions (How did one define a type? What constituted deviation? How were morbid changes distinguished from healthy?), but it also proved highly portable’ (Arata, Fictions of Loss, p. 15). 6 I appropriate the phrase ‘Gothic effulgence’ from Robert Miles, who uses it to characterise the first flowering of this mode of writing in the last decade of the eighteenth century (see Robert Miles, ‘The 1790s: The Effulgence of Gothic’, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 41–62). 7 Daniel Pick shows how the Lancet – one of Britain’s most respected medical journals – entertained discussions about degeneration from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Starting with clinical analyses of degenerative organs in the human body and anthropological accounts of ‘primitive’ peoples in the 1850s, degeneration was first addressed as a possible pathological condition of Britain’s urban population in the 1860s (see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1989) 1993), pp. 189–90). Throughout the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, the potential dangers of degeneration, which were extensively analysed by the era’s scientific community, similarly preoccupied social reformers, journalists and readers. 8 Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1996) 2004), p. 73. 9 Charles Kingsley, Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays (London and New York: Macmillan, 1902), p. 26. 10 See Kingsley, Lectures and Essays, p. 23. 11 Kingsley, Lectures and Essays, p. 25. 12 Kingsley, Lectures and Essays, p. 26. 13 Kingsley, Lectures and Essays, p. 29. 14 See Kingsley, Lectures and Essays, p. 31. 15 [Anon.], ‘Canon Kingsley on Physical Degeneration’, The Examiner (12 October 1872), pp. 999–1000 (1000). 16 [Anon.], ‘The Alleged Degeneration of Man’, Chambers’s Journal (9 October 1875), pp. 655–6 (655). 17 [Anon.], ‘Alleged Degeneration’, p. 655. 18 James Cantlie, Degeneration Amongst Londoners (London: Field & Tuer et al., 1885), p. 24. 19 Cantlie, Degeneration, p. 28. 20 Cantlie, Degeneration, p. 39. 21 Cantlie, Degeneration, p. 10. 22 Cantlie, Degeneration, p. 9. 23 See Cantlie, Degeneration, p. 16. 24 Reginald Brabazon, ‘Decay of Bodily Strength in Towns’, The Nineteenth Century (May 1887), pp. 673–6 (673). 25 Brabazon, ‘Decay of Bodily Strength’, p. 674. Notes 221 26 Brabazon, ‘Decay of Bodily Strength’, p. 674. 27 See Brabazon, ‘Decay of Bodily Strength’, pp. 674–5. 28 G. W. Hambleton, ‘Are We Degenerating Physically?’, The Lancet (29 December 1888), p. 1284. 29 Walter Shaw Sparrow, ‘Has Our Race Degenerated?’, The Idler (December 1897), pp. 678–81 (681). 30 Kingsley, Lectures and Essays, p. 21. 31 Hambleton, ‘Are We Degenerating Physically?’, p. 1284. 32 Hugh Percy Dunn, ‘Is Our Race Degenerating?’, The Nineteenth Century (August 1894), pp. 301–14. 33 [Anon.], ‘Are We Degenerating?’, The Speaker (2 February 1895), pp. 127–8 (127). 34 Shaw Sparrow, ‘Has Our Race Degenerated?’, p. 678. 35 Dunn, ‘Is Our Race Degenerating?’, p. 314. 36 On 18 February 1885, the weekly included a cartoon over the title ‘The Degeneration of Londoners’ that showed a prim-and-proper English country squire being addressed by a stunted and malnourished London boy in the streets of the capital. The caption read: ‘According to Mr. James Cantlie, F.R.C.S., a pure Londoner of the third generation is an [sic] unique specimen of physical decay. When our Country Cousin comes up for a holiday – say fifty years hence – he will no doubt present a contrast something like the above’ ([Anon.], ‘The Degeneration of Londoners’, Fun (18 February 1885), p. 71). 37 Dunn, for instance, attempted a rare statistical comparison of the ‘Report of the Factory Commissioners’ of 1833 with the ‘Report of the Local Government Board on “Changes in Hours and Ages of Employment of Children and Young Persons in Textile Factories”’ of 1873 to settle the question once and for all (see Dunn, ‘Is Our Race Degenerating?’, p. 313). He argued that his results could not support the theory of a progressive degeneration of Britain’s urban population. Even though Dunn conceded the unhealthy living conditions of the urban poor, he believed that the evolutionary mechanism of an organism’s adaptation to environmental change would ensure the progressive development of the human race (see Dunn, ‘Is Our Race Degenerating?’, p. 301). For other contemporary voices about the degeneracy controversy, see William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 41–6 and pp. 47–53). 38 Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin (1971) 1976), pp. 11–12. 39 The classic study of the London ‘residuum’ and its perception as a dangerous underclass by Britain’s bourgeoisie is Stedman Jones, Outcast London. William Greenslade points out how middle-class complacency about the living conditions of London’s underclass was shaken by Andrew Mearns’s The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Enquiry into the Conditions of the Abject Poor (1883), ‘the most talked about pamphlet of the 1880s’ (Greenslade, Degeneration, p. 48). Deborah Epstein Nord analyses the way in which nineteenth-century urban explorers such as William Booth, Margaret Harkness (‘John Law’), Jack London, Henry Mayhew and George Sims consistently compared the inhabitants of Victorian slums to the natives of Africa, Australia and the South Sea Islands (see Deborah Epstein Nord, ‘The Social Explorer as Anthropologist: Victorian Travellers Among the Urban Poor’, in William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock (eds), Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Art, and Literature (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 122–34). 222 Notes 40 See Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 19–20. 41 See Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, p. 26. 42 See Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, pp. 29–30. 43 See Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, p. 23. 44 See Pick, Faces of Degeneration, p.

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