This book surveys the various competing strains of evolutionary theory in the final decades of the nineteenth century, which ranged from neo-Lamarckian ideas of progress through the inheritance of acquired characteristics to widespread concerns with retrogression and degeneration brought on by adaptation to less complex environmental conditions, and examines how late-Victorian novelists both reflected and participated in these scientific debates. Glendening focuses particularly on Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles , Stoker's Dracula and Conrad's Heart of Darkness , with a coda on A. S. Byatt's neo-Victorian novel Possession , and argues that each of these works draws out the complexities, confusions and uncertainties of Darwinism and other forms of evolutionary thought in this period.

Literary scholarship on Darwinian science is of course nothing new in the field of Victorian Studies, and the novels that Glendening considers are all eminently canonical and have been studied from a scientific perspective on many previous occasions. His book nevertheless makes an interesting contribution to the wider field in attempting to accommodate the seemingly mutually exclusive perspectives of neo-Darwinian humanism, which takes evolution as something timelessly true and uses the insights of modern evolutionary psychology to analyse literature, and socio-linguistic constructivism, which, as in the work of Gillian Beer most famously, employs literary critical techniques of close reading to situate scientific writing like that of Darwin as ineluctably part of wider culture. Although perhaps not entirely successful and somewhat unfair and simplistic in its characterization of constructivism, Glendening's attempt to combine naturalistic and constructivist methodologies at least bears comparison with George Levine's similar but much more nuanced approach in Darwin Loves You (2006).

Glendening has clearly read very widely on all aspects of late-Victorian evolutionary thought and his book offers clear and extremely detailed expositions of the technicalities of many different theories, while his meticulous analysis of Darwin's use of the concept of entanglement was subtle and insightful. However, because Glendening generally deals with areas that have already been studied extensively by Victorian scholars over the last couple of decades much of the book felt overly familiar (for instance, Peter Allan Dale's brilliant In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture [1989] covers very similar ground but was not included in the bibliography). Glendening's very close readings of canonical novels were also sometimes rather narrowly focused, so that the account of The Island of Doctor Moreau paid no attention to the relation between gender and retrogression that is conspicuous in Wells's novel and certainly implicit in much scientific writing on degeneration including Darwin's own Descent of Man .

Gowan Dawson (University of Leicester)

More details are available at the Ashgate Press website.