In this innovative and thought-provoking study, Christine Ferguson investigates the role of language, biology and philology in relation to popular fiction of the later nineteenth century. As she observes, the impact of Victorian philology, with its quest for mythical roots, mental hierarchies and animal origins, is indeed the stuff of fiction. Ferguson here seeks to unsettle the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literary art by demonstrating the ways in which best-selling fiction was imbricated within the current linguistic debate. To this end she produces a most productive analysis of the role of the OED under R.C. Trench, showing how the dictionary’s much-lauded inclusiveness paradoxically harboured threatening elements of democratisation, whilst Trench himself emphasised the gap between English and the ‘barbarity’ of so-called savage language systems. The science of language epitomised by the Darwinian school of thought served, as she shows, to domesticate evolutionary theory, a project which was resisted by Max Müller with his insistence on species hierarchy.

Having laid the groundwork in a clear-headed exposition, Ferguson proceeds by way of a number of literary-critical analyses of marketable texts, commencing with Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895), which is taken as symptomatic of a defence of the linguistically ‘primitive’ as offering a route to ‘a purified, Edenic spiritual space’ prior to the current state of linguistic degeneracy. Such work led reviewers (one of Corelli’s targets) to postulate a threatening primitivism attached to popular culture in a kind of ‘anthropologisation’ of language, and Corelli is read here as a domestic version of the new vogue for anthropological romance fiction (Lang, Haggard, Stevenson) which is resistant to ‘the semantic instability of modern life’. The anthropological turn is given a novel perspective in the combative oeuvre of Grant Allen, where the primitive is ‘placed in the home, in the present, and within the white skin of “respectable” ladies’. Ferguson offers a trenchant critique of Allen’s curious mixture of pacifism and racism, and she is astute in her delineation of his Social Darwinist/Spencerean predilections, offering pertinent readings of such works as The Great Taboo (1890) and The British Barbarians (1895). She goes on to frame Wells’s Island of Dr Moreau (1896) most usefully in relation to Henry Salt’s Animal Rights (1892) and the debate around animal language; in particular, she resurrects the work of a forgotten campaigner, R.L.Garner, whose studies in ape ‘language’ were highly controversial in the 1890s.

This linguistic humanism, and the allied anti-vivisection movement, provides a fertile context for a re-reading of Dr Moreau, and Ferguson concludes with a thoughtful reassessment of a text on which there might now be a critical moratorium, Dracula. Language, Science and Popular Fiction offers a very engaged and engaging account of a neglected field of study. Ferguson’s methodology is notably empirical, and she generally eschews the linguistic concerns of post-structuralist thought, but her work certainly opens up many new avenues in the study of fin de siècle literature and culture.

I note the following errors: p. 1: Osbourne House; p. 11: Chamber’s; p. 15: Reeves (Reeve); p. 35: began (begun); p. 36: implicity; p. 37: discernable; p. 55: Thackery; p. 81: contributers; p. 86: anarchronistic; p. 102: indictiments; p. 121: prophesize; p. 131: Patricia Thurschwell (Pamela).

Roger Ebbatson (Loughborough University)

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