Reception

The timescale now stretches to the year following the presentation of the evidence. They are warned by Charles Kingsley to expect clerical opposition, but it is slow in coming. Instead, there is a lively debate in the papers about the status of the stone tools and how to account for them. These ideas are set against Herbert Spencer’s view that all life and culture proceeds from the simple to the complex. Are Evans and Prestwich tapping into his idea of progress rather than Darwin’s natural selection, which appears later in the year? The chapter explores when, in 1859, historians such as Buckle, Macaulay, and Freeman thought history began. Their views contrast with the Northern Antiquaries of Scandinavia, who had proposed an earlier prehistoric period before written records. The time revolution had to be fitted into this scheme, and Lubbock was instrumental in finding it room. The time revolution set out to correct bad geology. The timescale of Genesis was simply wrong, although further confrontation with religious beliefs troubled Prestwich. The time revolutionaries were supported by the furore surrounding Essays and Reviews, published in 1860, where clerics challenged the Church’s authority on these matters. The question of how old the artefacts were is examined. They had no means of scientifically measuring age and remained sceptical of conjecture. Their suggestions are compared with those adopted by geologists such as Lyell and Phillips for physical changes in the earth.

The Oxford Movement, Asceticism, and Sexual Desire

The chapter is set in the context of the history of the denominational evolution of monasticism and sainthood within Victorian Catholicism in both its Roman and Anglican forms. It explores, by means of a series of key examples, the battle between the proponents and opponents of medieval and contemporary monasticism and sainthood. The aim of this is to explain the range of views towards religious asceticism within Victorian society and their relationship to contemporary constructions of gender and forms of sexual desire. Examples of key figures, notably John Henry Newman, Charles Kingsley, and Joseph Leycester Lyne, provide instances of some of the ways in which sexual desire became associated with Catholic forms of devotion which, on the face of it, championed celibacy and resistance to fleshly desires.

Sir Walter Scott and the Medievalist Novel

This chapter focuses primarily on Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) and the novels—including Scott’s subsequent crusading fictions—that paid tribute to it through their engagement with roughly the same period of English history. In the hands of writers such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Kingsley, the historical novel after Scott tended to present the Norman invasion as an enduringly formative moment in the making of modern imperial Britain. Popular fictions by Charlotte Yonge and G. A. Henty, composed for child readers, were similarly inspired by Scott, though in their reductive rewriting of Ivanhoe they further contributed to Scott’s ‘descent to the school-room’. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow (1883), by contrast, I will argue in conclusion, recovers the playfully reflexive scepticism of Ivanhoe and detaches the adolescence of its confused hero from any idea of an analogous national emergence.

Charles Kingsley

This chapter considers the conflict-laden work of Charles Kingsley. Kingsley was an avid follower of scientific developments. In 1842 he urged one of his correspondents to ‘study medicine [… I am studying it’. In the social novels Yeast (1848), Alton Locke (1850), and Two Years Ago (1857), we see the fruits of these labours, particularly in how the languages and methods of biology offer Kingsley a means of challenging views of starvation as an inevitable, necessary evil. In his portrayals of radical characters, Kingsley discusses how scientific ideas precluded the political appropriation of starvation as a means to beat the well-to-do. Famous for locking horns with John Henry Newman on the abstract question of what constitutes truth, Kingsley argues a case for seeing topics like the physiology of hunger not as a symbol of providentialist or radical thinking, but as the means of creating a more intelligent understanding of poverty.

The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy

What actually happens to our bodies when we starve? How does the sensation of hunger come about, and how exactly does going without food lead to death? Do we die from hunger, or do we die from the secondary conditions it causes? And how is the physiology of something so familiar to us, experienced by each of us every day, so little known? This book is the first study to suggest that these questions were first explored in detail in the nineteenth century. The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy is a reassessment of the languages and methodologies used, throughout the nineteenth century, for discussing extreme hunger. Set against the providentialism of conservative political economy, this study uncovers an emerging, dynamic way of describing literal starvation in the period’s medicine and physiology. No longer seen as a divine punishment for individual failings, starvation became, in the human sciences, a pathology whose horrific symptoms registered failings of state and statute. Providing new and historically rich readings of the works of Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens, this work suggests that the realism we have come to associate with Victorian social-problem fiction learned a vast amount from the empirical, materialist objectives of the medical sciences, and that, within the work of these intersections, we find important re-examinations of how we might think about this ongoing humanitarian issue.