| Beer, Gillian. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary
Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983).
Beer considers Kingsley's debt to Darwin and the evolutionary theories in his works, particularly The Water-Babies. The latter novel, Beer points out, echoes how Darwin's natural order reflects such features of Victorian society as division of labor, competition, and family structures. Kingsley also follows to a certain degree Darwin's challenge to Malthusian theories. Like Darwin, Kingsley disputes Malthus by regarding profusion and hyper-productivity as good and in his account of the evolutionary process of the once excluded Tom he challenges Malthusian social theory. "In its unguarded and unanalytic response to Darwin's ideas and rhetoric, Kingsley's work represents the first phase of assimilation. He grasped much of what was fresh in Darwin's ideas while at the same time retaining a creationist view of experience" (138). Darwin; Evolution;
Malthus;
The
Water-Babies.
Wood, Naomi. “A (Sea) Green
Victorian: Charles Kingsley and the The Water-Babies,” Lion
and the Unicorn Vol. 19, No. 2 (1995): 233-52.
|