Entangled Influence: Wordsworth and Darwinism in the Late Victorian Period A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Trenton B. Olsen IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Andrew Elfenbein July 2014 © Trenton B. Olsen 2014 i Acknowledgements Many people have contributed to this dissertation in some way, and I owe thanks to more of them than I can acknowledge here. Generous support from the University of Minnesota's Department of English and College of Liberal Arts in the form of the Martin Rudd Graduate Research Fellowship, the Graduate Research Partnership Program Fellowship, and various research and travel grants have provided me with the time and resources needed to complete this project. The staff at Minnesota's Wilson Library and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University also gave helpful assistance. Several organizations have allowed me to test these ideas and receive valuable feedback in workshops and presentations. The Nineteenth Century Subfield at the University of Minnesota has been an especially supportive and stimulating intellectual community. Participants at the North American Victorian Studies Association, the British Association for Romantic Studies, and the Midwest and Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association conferences have contributed through thoughtful questions and comments. My advisor, Andrew Elfenbein, has been the ideal mentor. His insightful, clear, and remarkably prompt feedback have been invaluable. For striking the perfect balance of giving knowledgeable direction and simultaneously enabling independence, I thank him. My committee members Brian Goldberg, Gordon Hirsch, and Anna Clark have each given perceptive and useful comments at various stages of this project. Special thanks to Brian Goldberg for his generosity and guidance in a directed reading on Wordsworth. Graduate seminars at Minnesota have been tremendously useful opportunities for training and development. This is a study of origins and influence, and I'm grateful for the professors whose teaching and advising had a formative effect on my early scholarly development as an undergraduate at Utah State University. These include Christine-Cooper Rompato, Anne Shifrer, Joyce Kinkead, and especially Brian McCuskey, who directed an undergraduate thesis that gave me a sturdy foundation on which to build in graduate school, and has generously continued giving insightful feedback on my work. Looking back even further, I'm grateful for the teaching and encouragement of Judy McAllister and Don Ward. My deepest thanks go to my family. My parents, Brad and Marianne Olsen, have given unfailing love and encouragement as always. My mother, who has read nearly a thousand pages of my writing over the years, and has been generous both with her praise and grammatical expertise, deserves particularly grateful acknowledgement. My in-laws, Mike and Kathy Lee, have been wonderfully supportive, and my siblings, both by birth and marriage, have been a great source of strength. I can't imagine what these years would have been like without the companionship of my wife, Mandy. Her goodness, affection, and unwavering belief in me have been gifts beyond measure. I'm grateful for the times she helped me follow Wordsworth's precept to "quit [my] books" and "come forth into the light of things" as well as her patient understanding when I could not ("The Tables Turned" 1, 15). It is to her that this dissertation is dedicated. Finally, I'd like to acknowledge our one-year-old son Austin. Wordsworth wrote that "a child, more than all other gifts . brings hope with [him] and forward-looking thoughts" ("Michael" 146-148). Austin has brought both in abundance, along with more love than we thought possible. ii Dedication For Mandy iii Abstract This dissertation examines the intersection of William Wordsworth’s influence and evolutionary theory---the nineteenth century's two defining representations of nature---in late Victorian literature and society. Victorian writers were sensitive to the compatibilities and conflicts between these philosophies, and Wordsworth’s poetry was enlisted in arguments both for and against evolution. Creative writers and critics alike turned to the poet as an alternative or antidote to evolution, criticized and revised his poetry in response to this discourse, and synthesized elements of each to propose their own modified theories. In engaging with Wordsworth’s influence in this way, these writers began to see literary influence and history in Darwinian terms. They viewed their engagement with Wordsworth and Darwin, which was both competitive and collaborative, as a struggle for literary survival and offspring as well as transformative encounters in their development. This model of "literary selection" synthesizes opposing influence theories, and differs from objectivist accounts of Darwinian cultural transmission through its emphasis on writers' subjectivities, idiosyncratic language, and conscious adoption and modification of evolutionary ideas in their literary relationships. The opening chapter surveys a broad range of critical and creative writing to demonstrate the prevalence of Wordsworth’s and Darwin’s intertwining influences in the period, and outlines the various ideological positions late Victorian writers occupied toward these entangled philosophies. The chapter explores these simultaneous influences in the work of Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Charles Kingsley, and Emily Pfieffer along with a host of Victorian critics. The three central chapters provide in-depth demonstrations of this argument in the work of Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Robert Louis Stevenson, respectively. The final chapter moves beyond literature to read the late nineteenth-century conservation movement, in which The Wordsworth Society helped establish the National Trust to preserve the Lake District’s landscape, as a conflict between Wordsworthian and Darwinian ideas. iv Table of Contents Introduction 1 1. Wordsworth in the Age of Evolution 14 2. Creative and Critical Interventions: Wordsworth and Culture in the Work of Matthew Arnold 50 3. Evolving from Wordsworth and Darwin in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda 83 4. "Trailing Clouds of . Primal Sympathy": Robert Louis Stevenson’s Evolutionary Wordsworth 117 5. Entangled Arguments: Wordsworth, Evolution, and the Preservation Movement 144 Conclusion 172 Bibliography 176 1 Introduction ________________________________________________________________________ If William Wordsworth's representation of nature became the established cultural standard of the first half of the nineteenth century in Great Britain, evolutionary theorists defined the natural world for its second half. In many ways, the two philosophies couldn't appear more different: Wordsworth represents a benevolent natural world that inspires, serves as a moral guide, and reminds us of our divine origins and potential, whereas Darwin reveals an indifferent, violent nature that points to an evolutionary past, and demands participation in the brutal contest of survival of the fittest. Recent efforts to reveal the unlikely pairing of the poet and naturalist include George Levine’s claim that a Wordsworthian spirit “remains alive and well in the very texture of Darwin’s gradualist materialism” and David Amigoni’s more direct assertion that Wordsworth’s poems helped shape both Darwin’s theories and his conception of the scientific enterprise (155). While these readers bring needed attention to commonly overlooked aspects of Darwinism, they are not the first to sense a connection between Wordsworth and evolution. Rather than focusing on how Wordsworth may have contributed to Darwin's work, this dissertation will track and analyze the interaction and conflict between their ideas in the work of creative writers, critics, and the broader culture. While these intersecting influences have not been explored in modern criticism, readers in the late nineteenth century were very much aware of and interested in their relationship. 2 Late Victorians recognized a dialogue between Wordsworth and Darwinian evolution.1 Both gave revolutionary and culturally dominant accounts of nature and our place in it. Some commentators saw an analogy between their scientific and poetic approaches to the natural world. Naturalist and essayist John Burroughs uses Wordsworth and Charles Darwin as representative of the poet and the naturalist, noting "both half create the world they describe," explaining that while one used the poetic imagination and the other the scientific understanding, each created something from their observations of nature (36). Whereas Darwin found in nature the origins of life, Wordsworth turned to the natural world to find the origin of language, literature, and spirituality. Evolutionary theory prompted many Victorians to reconsider fundamental beliefs about nature and its relation to humankind, human origins, and moral responsibility. Wordsworth was inextricably associated with these issues, and consequently became part of this cultural reassessment of ideas. In many late Victorian texts, when Wordsworth comes up, Darwinism isn't far off, and vice-versa. These two views of nature were so pervasive, and the points of analogy and incongruity between them were so profound, that many Victorians found that responding to evolution required retracing Wordsworth's steps. In exploring the intersection of these influences, let me emphasize that this dissertation