Beastly Journeys: Travel and Transformation at the fin de siècle

235 Pages·2014·1.14 MB·English

by  Tim Youngs

be astly jour neys
LIVER POOL ENGLISH TEXTS AND STUDIES 63
BEASTLY JOURNEYS
Travel and Transformation
at the fn de siècle
TIM YOUNGS
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
First published 2013 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool
L69 7ZU
Copyright © 2013 Tim Youngs
Te right of Tim Youngs to be identifed as the author of this book has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data
A British Library CIP record is available
ISBN 978-1-84631-958-7 cased
Typeset by XL Publishing Services
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
For
John and Pauline Lucas
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction: Te Unchaining of the Beast 1
1 City Creatures 39
2 Te Bat and the Beetle 74
3 Morlocks, Martians, and Beast-People 107
4 ‘Beast and man so mixty’:
Te Fairy Tales of George MacDonald 140
5 Oscar Wilde: ‘an unclean beast’ 165
Conclusion 197
Bibliography 21
Index 20
vii
Acknowledgements
Tis book has had a long gestation. Early stages of it were supported
through research leave funded by the Arts and Humanities Research
Board and through my own university department’s sabbatical
programme. I am grateful to both bodies. Te following people have also
helped through, variously, their provision of ideas, information, encour-
agement, and the hosting of lectures, seminars, and conferences at which
early drafts of some material were tried out: Chris Barker, Dinah Birch,
Joseph Bristow, Antoinette Burton, Viv Chadder, Stephen Donovan,
Justin D. Edwards, R. J. (Dick) Ellis, Charles Forsdick, Shirley Foster,
Christopher Gair, Indira Ghose, Mike Green, Lynne Hapgood, Tracey
Hill, Peter Hulme, Philip Leonard, John Lucas, Roger Luckhurst, Gesa
Mackenthun, Richard Pearson, Lyssa Randolph, Ray Russell, Wim
Tigges, Richard White, Martin Willis, and David Woods. My thanks
go also to the inter-library loans team at Nottingham Trent University.
I am especially grateful to Anthony Cond for encouraging submission
of the book to Liverpool University Press and for his patience and good
humour in seeing it through to publication. Any weaknesses, oddities,
and errors are my own.
Portions of Chapter One and Chapter Tree have their origins in three
earlier essays, whose ideas they develop: ‘Stevenson’s Monkey-Business:
Te Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’, in Peter Liebregts and
Wim Tigges, eds, Beauty and the Beast: Christina Rossetti, Walter Pater,
R. L. Stevenson and their Contemporaries (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996),
pp.157–170; ‘Wells’s Fifth Dimension: Te Time Machine at the Fin de
Siècle’, in Tracey Hill and Alan Marshall, eds, Decadence and Danger:
Writing, History and the Fin de Siècle (Bath: Sulis Press, 1997), pp.64–74;
and ‘Te Plasticity of Living Forms: Beasts and Narrative in Te Octopus
and Te Island of Doctor Moreau’, Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American
Literary Relations 1, 1 (April 1997), 86–103. I am grateful to Rodopi,
Tracey Hill, and Christopher Gair respectively for allowing me to draw
ix
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on this nascent material. For permission to quote from H. G. Wells’s
works I am grateful to A. P. Watt.
As ever, the greater and lasting acknowledgement is to Gurminder and
Natty for being who they are.