The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past PDF
Preview The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past
^3- The Invention of Progress The Victorians and the Past Peter J. Bowler JTL ■ d Basil Blackwell Copyright© Peter J. Bowler 1989 First published 1989 Basil Blackwell Ltd 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, 0X4 1JF, UK Basil Blackwell, Inc. 3 Cambridge Center Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication 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 permission of the publisher. Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bowler, Peter J. The invention of progress: the Victorians and the past / Peter J. Bowler. p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Social evolution. 2. Progress. 3. Anthropology—History—19th century. 4. Human evolution. I. Title. GN360.B67 1990 303.44—dc20 89-36164 ISBN 0-631-16107-4 Typeset in 11 on 12pt Ehrhardt by Hope Services, Abingdon Printed in Great Britain by Billings & Sons Ltd, Worcester Contents i Preface vii List of Illustrations x Introduction: Patterns of History 1 Part I The Development of Society 1 Progress and Civilization 17 Whig History 20 Social Evolutionism 30 Interlude: The Fascination of the Past 40 2 Rise and Fall 49 The Pulse of History 52 The Myth of Race 59 Part II The Evolution of Mankind 3 The Antiquity of Man 75 The Origin of Society 77 The Emergence of Mind 84 Interlude: Missing Links 98 4 The Origin of Races 106 Migration and Conquest 109 Progress through Struggle 117 Part III The Ascent of Life 5 Fossils and Progress 131 Radical Evolutionism 135 143 Darwinism Triumphant? Vi CONTENTS Interlude: Reading the Rocks 159 6 Progress by Leaps 169 Catastrophes and Progress 171 Growth and Decline 183 Epilogue: Progress and Degeneration 192 Bibliography 202 Index 220 Preface This book had its origins in a programme broadcast in London Weekend Television’s series The Making of Britain. Lesley Smith, who was researching the series, decided to include a programme on the Victorians’ fascination with the past. She soon realized that the topic could be extended beyond the bounds of ‘modern’ history to include prehistory and even the study of the fossil record. I was brought in on the strength of my interests in nineteenth-century evolutionism, and a programme was put together under the title ‘The Invention of the Past’. This particular title was chosen to indicate that the Victorians created an image of the past which would fit in with their ideology of progress. Even at the time, I was aware that my knowledge of Victorian attitudes towards modern and classical history was, to say the least, rather sketchy, but I did my best to describe how the idea of progress served to unify what might otherwise have seemed to be quite separate debates in the areas of history, archaeology and biological evolutionism. I was pleased to find that I could correlate some of my own ideas on Victorian evolutionism with what other historians have been saying about contemporary attitudes towards the more recent past. Further reading soon convinced me that a useful book could be written around the theme of the conflict between two models of progress in the Victorian era - what I have called the continuous and the cyclic models of progress - as they were extended to cover the ever wider range of the past opened up by archaeology and geology. The project was taken up enthusiastically by Virginia Murphy and the editorial staff at Basil Blackwell, and the result lies before you. Viii PREFACE By its very nature this is an interdisciplinary book, and I have tried to write at a level that will make the material comprehensible to nonspecialists in the various areas surveyed. Obviously, I write with more confidence on the topics of geology, palaeontology and evolution theory, since these are my primary fields of research. I hope that historians of science will find something of interest in my efforts to show that the models of the past used in these areas can be shown to reflect the same concerns as those underlying debates on human history. Conversely, I hope that readers more familiar with other aspects of Victorian culture will find it useful to have new avenues opened up by which they can approach the contemporary debates on evolution and mankind’s place in nature. It will not escape the attention of historians of science that I have used this survey to promote my own rather unorthodox views on the emergence of evolutionism. I can only say in my defence that as I tried to extend my knowledge of the Victorians’ attitudes towards the past, I became ever more strongly convinced of the violence that we do to the historiography of evolutionism by making the emergence of the theory of natural selection the centrepiece of the so-called ‘Darwinian revolution’. This is unashamedly a book on the history of ideas. I have made it quite clear that I see the two opposing theories of progress as having strong ideological overtones, but I have not engaged in the kind of minute sociological analysis that has become fashionable in the history of science. As far as I can tell, most of what I say is compatible with the new interpretations offered by these detailed studies, but I have been more interested in the possibility of building bridges between the history of science and other areas of Victorian studies. There is still room for fruitful generalization, especially when this can help to break down the barriers that exist between the history of science and other areas of the history of ideas. All too often, these barriers have been created by historians of science themselves insisting upon too close an adherence to what hindsight perceives to be the ‘main line’ of scientific development. Even when studying the wider impact of theories such as evolutionism, we have often allowed our work to be restricted by preconceived ideas about which issues were the most important. As far as I am aware, this book offers the first serious attempt to link Victorian ideas on the past across such a broad spectrum. The fact that historians of geology and evolutionism have not, so far, thought to explore the links between history and the historical sciences is another symptom of the determining role played by hindsight. Because geology and palaeontology opened up a world PREFACE ix beyond human history, we have tended to assume that scientists in these areas were free to create models of the past that did not relate to contemporary ideas on the development of society. If anyone should object that I have ignored the scientific dimension of geology, palaeontology or evolutionism, my only defence is that I have other fish to fry. The newly professionalized geology of the Victorian era was nevertheless a historical science, and its practitioners were often at pains to ensure that their ideas on the history of life on earth were compatible with their beliefs about the origin of mankind and the progress of civilization. The historical sciences, like the more rigorous study of human history that emerged in the same period, applied their methodology to the verification of theoretical models of the past that reflected the wider values of Victorian society. It is thus no coincidence that we can trace parallels between the models used to analyse the various levels of the past. One final point: this book is subtided The Victorians and the Past, but in fact it covers a somewhat broader timespan than the Victorian era itself. Many features of the mid-nineteenth-century debates were already beginning to emerge before Victoria came to the throne, and the Edwardian era certainly preserved and developed some aspects of late Victorian thought. As the epilogue suggests, the ‘Victorian’ ideal of progress survived into the early decades of the twentieth century, before collapsing in the face of accumulating social and philosophical pressures. Peter J. Bowler Belfast, 1988 I V List of Illustrations Plates 1 William Frederick Yeames, And When Did You Last See Your Father? 6 2 Sirjohn Everett Millais,/! Dream of the Past - Sir Isumbras at the Ford 24 3 Australian aboriginal marriage ceremony 35 4 John Martin, Belshazzar's Feast 45 5 Lowering the great winged bull of Nineveh 47 6 Sir Edward Poynter, The Catapult 54 7 Ford Maddox Brown, The Body of Harold brought before William the Conqueror 62 8 Sirjohn Everett Millais, The Boyhood of Raleigh 64 9 Prehistoric lake dwellings 80 10 Chellean and Acheulian stone tools 85 11 The skull of Pithecanthropus and a comparison with the skulls of a Cro-Magnon, a Neanderthal and a chimpanzee 104 12 Long-and round-headed skulls 114 13 The Temple of Serapis at Puzzuoli 146 14 Part of Darwin’s evolutionary tree 150 15 Ernst Haeckel’s evolutionary tree 156 16 Skeleton of the mammoth 162 17 Plesiosaurus 165 18 Reconstruction of Megalosaurus at Crystal Palace 173 19 Cephalaspis 176 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi Figures I 1 De Mortillet’s sequence of prehistoric toolmaking cultures 84 2 Sequence of geological formations 166 ■
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