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'Goblinlike, Fantastic: Little People and Deep Time at the Fin De Siècle

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'Goblinlike, Fantastic: Little People and Deep Time at the Fin De Siècle ORBIT-OnlineRepository ofBirkbeckInstitutionalTheses Enabling Open Access to Birkbeck’s Research Degree output ’Goblinlike, fantastic: little people and deep time at the fin de siècle https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40443/ Version: Full Version Citation: Fergus, Emily (2019) ’Goblinlike, fantastic: little people and deep time at the fin de siècle. [Thesis] (Unpublished) c 2020 The Author(s) All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copy- right law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit Guide Contact: email ‘Goblinlike, Fantastic’: Little People and Deep Time at the Fin De Siècle Emily Fergus Submitted for MPhil Degree 2019 Birkbeck, University of London 2 I, Emily Fergus, confirm that all the work contained within this thesis is entirely my own. ___________________________________________________ 3 Abstract This thesis offers a new reading of how little people were presented in both fiction and non-fiction in the latter half of the nineteenth century. After the ‘discovery’ of African pygmies in the 1860s, little people became a powerful way of imaginatively connecting to an inconceivably distant past, and the place of humans within it. Little people in fin de siècle narratives have been commonly interpreted as atavistic, stunted warnings of biological reversion. I suggest that there are other readings available: by deploying two nineteenth-century anthropological theories – E. B. Tylor’s doctrine of ‘survivals’, and euhemerism, a model proposing that the mythology surrounding fairies was based on the existence of real ‘little people’ – they can also be read as positive symbols of the tenacity of the human spirit, and as offering access to a sacred, spiritual, or magic, world. Although this is primarily a literary thesis, focusing on particular ‘weird’ texts by Arthur Machen, Grant Allen, John Buchan and Walter De La Mare among others, the subject matter requires considerable interdisciplinarity, particularly in the histories of anthropology and folklore studies. The new sciences of ethnology and anthropology had enabled the study of prehistory but, as the chronology and timescale of human existence became apparent, it also became increasingly opaque and incomprehensible. Dwarfs, in both reality and fantasy, held a series of peculiarly potent positions in the public consciousness throughout the nineteenth century (as ‘natural wonders’ or horrors, as living fairies or as illustrative of racial degeneration) but towards the fin de siècle they began to be seen more commonly as representative of an early, ‘savage’ stage of human development. This thesis argues that attention to these points allows more nuanced and diverse interpretations of the way evolutionary theories influenced late-Victorian Gothic and weird fiction, contributing to recent work that has sought to question and amend the dominant focus on degeneration tropes. 4 Table of Contents Page Introduction 6 Chapter 1 Little People in the Nineteenth Century: the ‘Sicilian Fairy’, the ‘Aztec Twins’ and ‘Stanley’s Pygmies’ 25 Chapter 2 True Fairy Tales: Euhemerism, Survivals and the Fairy-Land of Science 66 Chapter 3 Adult Fairy Tales, Popular Science, Adventure Yarns, Gothic Horror and the Inflationary Weird: Euhemerism in Fin de Siècle Fiction 105 Coda 155 Bibliography 165 5 Illustrations Page Fig. 1 Linley Sambourne, ‘Man is But a Worm’. Punch. 1881, December 6th : 11. 7 Fig. 2 Maximo and Bartola, daguerrotype c. 1850 by Beckers and Piard of New York, copy held by the Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College <<https://consecratedeminence.wordpress.com/category/ photography/daguerreotypes/>> [accessed 16.11.14] 35 Fig. 3 ‘Monkeyan’a’. Punch. 1861, May 18th: 206 << http://aleph0.clarku.eDu/huxley/comm/Punch/ Monkey.html>> [accessed 12.10.14] 46 Fig. 4 ‘Approach to the Camp of the Obongo Dwarfs’ from Du Chaillu. 1867. A Journey to Ashango Land: 316 << http://web.cc.yamaguchi-u.ac.jp/~kitanisi/ pygmy_doc/book/Chaillu67.html>> [accessed 24.9.14] 52 Fig. 5 ‘A Dwarf Village’ from Stanley. 1890. In Darkest Africa Vol. II: 104 << http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/11/29/ henry-morton-stanley-and-the-pygmies-of-darkest-africa/>> [accessed 04.10.14] 60 Fig. 6 ‘Group of small flying dragons, or pterodactyls’ Plate XII from Hutchinson. 1892. Extinct Monsters: 131 <<http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2009/07/extinct- monsters.html [accessed 8th December 2014] 88 6 Introduction On 6 December 1881, Punch published their almanack for the following year. It contained a cartoon called ‘Man is But a Worm’ by Linley Sambourne that showed the grave and elderly Charles Darwin, who was to die in April, surrounded by creatures illustrating evolution (Fig. 1). The procession starts at the bottom left corner, with the titular worm crawling from the broken remnants of the word ‘CHAOS’, and progresses in an anti-clockwise direction around his head. The creatures depicted move towards the tailless ape via the reptilian and the long- tailed monkey, until the evolutionary spiral culminates with a dapper gentleman with oiled hair and a boutonnière doffing his top hat to the scientist. The figure of interest to my argument appears just below Darwin’s beard and walks between the last obviously simian hominid and the first unmistakeably human hominin. It is, clearly, a goblin, a fantastical creature with prehensile fingers and webbed feet, a dwarfish, hairy, pot-bellied body with ungulate haunches, a short-nosed, long- upper-lipped face, jagged teeth and an expression of knowing malevolence. It is an odd and seemingly inexplicable inclusion in what is otherwise an understandable, if inaccurate, depiction of evolutionary progression. This thesis asks why the goblin might be there, and offers an answer in the shape of the theory of fairy-euhemerism that developed towards the end of the century. I examine the renascence of the anthropological theory of euhemerism towards the end of the nineteenth century, its establishment as a widespread and widely accepted hypothesis, and its considerable cultural and literary influence. ‘Euhemerism’ derives from the Sicilian author and philosopher Euhemerus (c. 316 BCE) who maintained that the Hellenic deities were nothing more than deified men: thus euhemerism regards myths as traditional accounts of real incidents in human history (O.E.D. 1989). Euhemerism’s impact on fin de siècle writings is under-examined and largely forgotten, although it is making something of a return as a geological model under the name of ‘geomythology’, a term coined by Dorothy Vitaliano in 1968. Geomythology theorises that natural events form the basis of 7 mythical episodes: the biblical Flood, for example, based on a real deluge, or the destruction of Sodom on an earthquake or volcanic eruption. Euhemerism hypothesises that beings now commonly held to be mythical, such as gods, or fairies, had their origin in real people, proposing that, for example, revered ancestors are deified as gods, and belief in fairies is based on the actual existence of an ancient race of small people. This fairy-euhemerism, the literature it inspired, and the way it affected little people and their place in society and culture is the subject of this thesis. Fig. 1 (Sambourne 1881: 11) 8 The fairy-euhemerism that emerged in the last two decades of the nineteenth century re-enchanted the apparently wholly material and biologically inevitable evolutionary process by suggesting that fairies, goblins, or ‘Little People’ were the biological forebears of modern humans. The fin de siècle was a period of dramatic cultural ambivalence, as the booming scholarship on the period that has appeared during the last three decades attests. It was an era of transition, ‘the hinge years’, as Alex Owen called the period (2004: 7); it was also ‘a crucial moment in the formation or transformation’ of a number of debates (Ledger 2000: xiv) as well as a time for ‘working-out… of unfinished lines; a tentative redirection’ (Williams 1971: 165). Euhemerism is one of the key ways in which some late-century Victorians described and understood the contested realms of science and the supernatural, and is a model of integration for those two combative spheres. Rather than the relentless march of scientific modernity laying waste superstitious beliefs about ‘Little People’, euhemerism reveals those little people as real, if ancient. So, rather than superstitious beliefs acting as a thin, increasingly worn, gloss on a mechanistic, material world, euhemerism says that the spiritual world exists as a provable reality, beneath a thin veneer of rational modernity. Euhemerism thus fulfils H. P. Lovecraft’s 1927 criterion as a subject for ‘weird fiction’, that it consists of more than ‘secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains’, and must convey a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain – a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space. (1945: 15)1 The ‘fixed laws of Nature’ that had hitherto demonstrated that fairies were fictional were challenged by euhemerism’s thesis that not only are fairies real, 1 I do not intend in this thesis to dwell on ‘weird fiction’ as a genre, tone or mode: this has been much-discussed recently by Vandermeer (2012), Luckhurst (2017) and Machin (2018) among others. However, I agree with Luckhurst that ‘weird’ is best defined, in the words of Veronica Hollinger as ‘an inflection or tone, a mode rather than a genre’ (Hollinger 2014: 140, qtd Luckhurst 2017). 9 they are our ancestors. Furthermore, some anthropologists suggested that they may yet exist. The revitalization of the concept of euhemerism during the latter half of the nineteenth century both influenced and was stimulated by activity in a number of academic and cultural fields, including the disciplines of anthropology, evolutionary science and the study of human prehistory.
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