The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels

‘The unknown region that lies beyond the Gray’s Inn Road’: Evolutionary Anxiety in the Country and the City in Arthur Machen's <i>The Green Round</i>

“…10 John Glendening, writing in 2007, emphasises the 'decentering' of the human accomplished by evolutionary theory, and its wide-ranging implications, touching as it did 'upon equally complicated cultural issues -religious, philosophical, economic, and political' . 11 Glendening, too, emphasises the imposition of the temporal axis of evolution upon the geographical axis of colonialism: the Victorians, he writes, 'applied physically distinctive Palaeolithic remains, which were turning up with increasing regularity, to non-Western peoples who thereby could be interpreted as prehistoric humans living in the present' . 12 But as knowledge of human ancestors and contact with 'primitive' cultures increased, keeping them separate from the self became increasingly difficult.…”