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The goal of this thesis is to reassess our understanding of Charles Darwin's theory of beauty by tracing the history of a distinctive aesthetic philosophy within the British natural theological tradition. I propose two new critical concepts as a way of characterising the common features of this aesthetics: "correspondency" and the "conceptual regime of the ontology of enjoyment" [CROE]. Correspondency is a term borrowed from the work of William Whewell, and aims to capture a universalised logic of adaptation as it was developed within the design argument and subsequently used to describe the aesthetic relationship between the sensorium (subject) and aesthetic object. CROE encapsulates how the sui generis pleasures of aesthetic experience were granted a distinctive ontological reality by this relational or adaptive model. On this foundation, I will argue that natural theological aesthetics offered a way of understanding beauty in terms of a non-Kantian teleological model - a purposeless purpose of design (or, in Darwinian sexual selection, evolution). In the first chapter I trace this theory from William Paley, through to the Bridgewater Treatises and several further authors in the 1830s, exploring how the theory of beauty in these texts might be understood as a transformation of the aesthetic sense theory of the eighteenth century (a tradition exemplified by Francis Hutcheson). In the second chapter I explore how this theory was developed through the 1840s and 50s, a period that marked the increasing ascendancy of anatomical idealism within both natural theological and natural philosophical disciplines. I chart how the teleological implications of natural theological aesthetic theory allow us to rethink the relationship between the functional teleology of Paley or Cuvier, and the idealism of figures such as Richard Owen or the young Huxley. I will argue that figures associated with morphological thought utilised the same aesthetic theory and arguments as the natural theological adaptationists they critiqued, and so CROE remained a durable structure of thought across apparently contradictory paradigms. Indeed, this durability provides leverage to reassess the way in which this entire division has been historically narrated. The second part of my thesis concerns the work of Charles Darwin, and how the public theory of beauty he developed between 1859 (the first edition of the Origin) and 1868 (the first edition of Variation Under Domestication) might be understood as a response to - and transformation of - this natural theological aesthetic theory. First, I explore Darwin's early response to the teleological ramifications of beauty, and then turn to the polemical context of the Argyll dispute as it forced Darwin to develop a more coherent aesthetic theory. I will show how Darwin's developing account of beauty took up the structure of CROE in order to naturalise the teleological challenge of intrinsic aesthetic purposiveness. Sexual selection provided a way to explain the aesthetic correlation between subject and object, with animals selecting for the conspecifics they found beautiful, and so materialising the ideal of their faculty of taste within the world itself. I will, however, argue that sexual selection was not the totality of Darwin's aesthetics, and analyse how Darwin offered a classification of different kinds of beauty based on the teleological implications of various natural forms. Alongside the real aesthetic purposiveness produced by sexual selection, Darwin offered an ontologically deflationary account of extrinsic or accidental attributions of beauty, securing his argument from contemporary critique as it continued to read Darwin's works in terms of a natural theological tradition of aesthetic theory.

This thesis aims to reexamine the works of Virginia Woolf and other Stephen family members through the lens of the supercrip concept first coined by crip theorists such as Alison Kafer and Eli Clare. Woolf has often been framed as a resourceful writer who converted the symptoms of her mental illness into sources of creative inspiration for her work. However, her life was also plagued by self-imposed, constant pressures to read and write in the face of the difficulties brought on by her symptoms. Letters between her father Leslie Stephen and Charles Darwin suggest that Leslie may have seen his literary talent as a way to justify his own disabled existence as a cyclothymic. This thesis traces how Leslie’s supercrip-infused, evolutionary ideology was transmitted into three of his disabled descendants: his first daughter Laura, his nephew Jem, and his third daughter Virginia. All three of these Stephen family members were subjected to lofty expectations for their reading and writing ability. By exploring the lives of Leslie, Jem, Laura, and Virginia, it is possible to observe the damaging effects of Darwinian theories on Victorian people with disabilities and see how the supercrip stereotype informs Woolf’s contributions to literary modernism.

This study examines Theodore Dreiser’s unique concept of evolutionary change as expounded in his 1920 collection of philosophical essays entitled Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life. Written and published after a period of intensive study in scientific philosophy and occult phenomena, this study uses the collection’s theoretical framework as a lens to explicate Dreiser’s rarely discussed 1929 semi-fictional collection of biographical sketches, A Gallery of Women, and the important role of the New Woman as an agent of evolutionary change in his fiction. Contemporaneously, prevailing scientific and evolutionary ideas in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries prompted feminists to renegotiate traditionalist assumptions about gender on the basis of rational thought. This project demonstrates how Dreiser’s philosophy and fiction contribute to the renegotiation of gender roles. Analyzing the ideas that influenced Dreiser’s philosophy including those of Charles Darwin, Hebert Spencer, Jacques Loeb, and occult theorist Charles Fort, this project traces the development of Dreiser’s naturalist and mystic philosophy through letters, biographical accounts and selections of his fiction, including Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier, An American Tragedy, and Gallery. This project demonstrates how American history as well as Dreiser’s Gallery firmly establish the New Woman as an agent of evolutionary change through the disruption of traditional gender roles.

In The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously in 1903 but written during the years 1873-1884, Samuel Butler presents his Victorian world as one in crisis, unhinged by recent scientific developments. Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859 and effectively undercut most religious and theological belief structures with his argument that all species evolved gradually over time from a common ancestor. If this is so, how could the Bible's story of creation be true? Samuel Butler incorporates terminology of evolution and develops his own evolutionary views in response to Charles Darwin's throughout the novel. Butler's protagonist, Ernest Pontifex, exemplifies the evolutionary process in a bildungsroman-style text to implicitly suggest Butler's belief that man cannot successfully adapt to his environment without wealth. Indeed, wealth can be seen as a sort of religion for Butler's protagonist, replacing the position God formerly held as that which was to be worshipped.

This study of the influence of Charles Darwin on Thomas Hardy's tragic novels centers on two key concepts in the work of Darwin. The first is Darwin's narrative of the evolution of morality, which describes moral decisions as a struggle for survival between various instincts, habits, and customs, both within the individual and within society as a whole. Of particular importance is the role of reason and sympathy in overcoming base and selfish instincts. The second is the idea, introduced in Origin, that the work of scientific breeders represents an act of Conscious Selection, a separate form of evolution in which human ingenuity deliberately changes the course of Natural Selection to create new varieties and species. Applying these ideas to Return of the Native, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure, I argue that all three novels essentially follow the same Darwinian arc: an individual who demonstrates the next stage in intellectual and emotional development required for the advancement of morality is introduced into an unsympathetic society. The conflict of the novels proceeds from the struggles, both within the individual and between the individual and the larger society, for the survival of those traits. The tragic outcomes of the novels are rooted in the fact that Hardy places those new traits in opposition to more traditional instincts and customs, driving them to extinction either through the death of the protagonist or through an atavistic return to more traditional values on the part of the protagonist. These tragic endings are meant to engage the sympathies of the reader while also appealing to their reason through the dissection of those internal and external forces that overcome the protagonists’ new views. In this way, Hardy applies the principles outlined in Origin and Descent to a project of moral husbandry first suggested by Darwin. Advisor: Linda Ray Pratt

The development and popular acceptance of evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century, of which Charles Darwin was perhaps the leading voice, produced perhaps the greatest cultural cataclysm of the Modern age. It held theological and philosophical implications beyond the scientific realm, profoundly impacting the humanities as well as science. The Arthurian legend, a story that has been told and retold for centuries before and after Darwin, offers us a unique opportunity to examine how a preexisting story was radically altered in the light of evolution. Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King and T. H. White's The Once and Future King are two retellings of the Arthurian story that react explicitly to the implications of evolution. While Tennyson was a contemporary of Darwin's, White writes in the twentieth century, between the two world wars. Tennyson reacts to evolution with disillusionment, depicting the fall of Camelot as a result of man's inability to transcend his animal identity. For White, however, the fall of Camelot illustrates the folly of a belief in any ideals, such as chivalry or nationalism, foreign to the animal kingdom. For White, evolutionary science provides a measure of hope and comfort: man, capable of waging world wars, is more barbaric than any animal, and yet, since he has not been evolving for as long as other animals, there still remains hope for him to develop into a peaceful animal. The centrality of evolution and its implications to both Tennyson's and White's retellings of the Arthurian story point to the power of the science of origins to impact man's view of himself and the world, as each man's reaction to evolutionary science affected nearly every aspect of his interpretation of pre-existing literature.

It is well known that American botanist Asa Gray's 1859 paper on the floristic similarities between Japan and the United States was among the earliest applications of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory in plant geography. Commonly known as Gray's "disjunction thesis," Gray's diagnosis of that previously inexplicable pattern not only provoked his famous debate with Louis Agassiz but also secured his role as the foremost advocate of Darwin and Darwinism in the United States. Making use of previously unknown archival materials, this dissertation examines the making of Gray's disjunction thesis and its relation to his collecting networks. I first point out that, as far back as the 1840s, Gray had identified remarkable "analogies" between the flora of East Asia and that of North America. By analyzing Gray and his contemporaries' "free and liberal exchange of specimens," I argue that Gray at the time was convinced that "a particular plan" existed in nature, and he considered that the floristic similarities between Japan and eastern North America manifested this plan. In the 1850s, when Gray applied himself to enumerating collections brought back by professional collectors supported by the subscription system and appointed in governmental surveying expeditions, his view of nature was then replaced by one that regarded the flora as merely "a catalogue of species." I argue that it was by undertaking the manual labor of cataloging species and by charging subscription fees for catalogued species that Gray established his status as a metropolitan botanist and as the "mint" that produced species as a currency for transactions in botanical communities. Finally, I examine the Gray-Darwin correspondence in the 1850s and the expedition that brought Gray's collector to Japan. I argue that Gray's thesis cannot be considered Darwinian as historians of science have long understood the term, and that its conception was part of the United States' scientific imperialism in East Asia. In light of recent studies focusing on the history of field sciences, this dissertation urges that a close examination of a biogeographical discovery like Gray's thesis is impossible without considering the institutional, cultural, and material aspects that tie the closets of naturalists to the field destinations of collectors.

This thesis analyzes H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness within the context of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory. I explore how Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley used evolution by natural selection to develop differing explanations of the origins of ethics and how this impacted the place each scientist gave morality in civilization. By exploring how Huxley and Darwin understood morality to derive from the phenomena of sympathy and restrain, I illustrate how Wells’s and Conrad’s novellas interrogate these discourses of altruism.

This dissertation examines how Charles Dickens’s last completed novels, which appeared after the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859), process Victorian anxieties about evolutionary origins and connections. I argue that Dickens’s thematic work with origins and identity—specifically in Great Expectations (1860-61) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65)—ultimately transcends the epistemological dislocations of Darwinism through an affirmation of self–determination and development over biological determination and origins. I examine how this is registered most powerfully in the novels’ emphasis on the liberatory and redemptive nature of self-narration and narrative fantasy. Furthermore, I read this aesthetic assertion as Dickens’s developing response to Darwinian evolutionary theory and a bridge between the social commentary of his last two completed novels. This aesthetic counterpositioning demonstrates how Dickens’s engagement with Darwinian science was complex and richly contradictory. I begin by summarizing and synthesizing Goldie Morgentaler’s and Anny Sadrin’s key work on issues of heredity and parentage in Dickens’s oeuvre. As Morgentaler and Sadrin have argued, Dickens’s work before 1859 primarily articulates a deterministic vision of cohesion and continuity in personal and social identity. Dickens’s treatment of self-formation, however, becomes increasingly critical of hereditary determinants and undergoes a radical unraveling in his post–Origin work. Building on Morgentaler’s and Sadrin’s work, among others, I argue that Great Expectations is ultimately unable to harmonize the deterministic tenets of evolutionary theory with the liberatory desires that underwrite any act of self–narration. Retrospective narration becomes a site for remaking origins and identity through the fruitful distortions of storytelling. Dickens’s next and last finished novel, Our Mutual Friend, extends and heightens this work. I present an extended reading and recontextualization of the lengthy soliloquy that bisects the book—in which the central character hijacks the narrative authority of the novel’s third–person omniscient narrator and seeks to remake himself through a conspicuous act of self–narration. The Harmon soliloquy grapples with issues of origin and predestination and privileges even more emphatically the self-germinating potential of the individual over hereditary and environmental determinants.

Charles Darwin's fame and success as a scientist were undoubtedly based on the reception of the evolutionary paradigm he articulated in Origin of Species. Although many of Darwin's ideas were only ideas at the time of Origin's publication, they indubitably fostered the widespread acceptance of the evolutionary worldview among scientists and non-scientists. And this phenomenon took place in a relatively short period of time. The fact that much of Darwin's evolutionary thesis was well received and yet was clearly, and by his own admission, hypothetical, may seem to be a curious development. This thesis project will center on two factors that contributed to Origin's success: Darwin's persuasive and argumentative skills and his appropriation of romantic literary devices. Along with Darwin's rhetoric, I will examine his use of conventional romanticist poetic discourse and typology within an overarching systematic mythology. In short, I will demonstrate that Darwin's success as a scientist was contingent upon his rhetorical skills and, to some degree, his cultivation of romantic themes, prose, and myth. In order to better understand the author and his audience, I will introduce my argument by exploring some background information on Darwin and the currents of thought in the Victorian Era. I will also analyze Darwin's copiously documented correspondence, reflect upon his pre-Origin notes, and highlight other biographical material. Subsequently, I will demonstrate that 1) Darwin was deeply committed to his view but was unable to demonstrate it in a limited time frame or substantiate it with empirical evidence, 2) Darwin's presentation in Origin was self-consciously and strategically designed to subvert the creationist paradigm that already was under attack during his era, and 3) It was necessary for Darwin to resort to various and sundry rhetorical and literary strategies in order for this presentation to be effective. As a result, I will present my view of Origin as much more an exercise in rhetoric, literary innovation, and mythology than the verifiable and objective categorization of scientific facts. As Darwin himself called Origin "one long argument," I will examine, in depth, his rhetorical strategies especially in relation to classical rhetoric. Aristotle's Rhetoric along with the poignant research of rhetorician John Campbell will be instrumental towards these ends. Along with Darwin's mastery of rhetoric, his early reading and writings will confirm his affinity with Romanticism. I will consequently document the relationship between the nature-worship and language of the Romantics and the naturalism and poetic discourse that is foundational in much of Origin. I will make such connections in part by discussing Darwin's ideas and writing style in terms of the poetry of men like Wordsworth and Tennyson. I will also identify Darwin's use of Romanticism as a clever literary strategy designed to appeal to Romanticist-influenced Victorians. Finally, I will examine Darwin's ability to create a counter-mythology to creationism.

The worlds of Dickens's novels and of Darwin's science reveal striking similarity in spite of their involvement in different areas. The similarity comes from the fact that they shared the ethos of Victorian society: laissez-faire capitalism. In The Origin of Species, which was published on 1859, Charles Darwin theorizes that nature has evolved through the rules of natural selection, survival of the fittest, and the struggle for existence. Although his conclusion comes from the scientific evidence that was acquired from his five-year voyage, it is clear that Dawinian nature is reflected in cruel Victorian capitalism. Three novels of Charles Dickens which were published around 1859, Bleak House, Hard Times, and Our Mutual Friend, share Darwinian aspects in their fictional worlds. In Bleak House, the central image, the Court of Chancery as the background of the novel, resembles Darwinian nature which is anti-Platonic in essence. The characters in Hard Times are divided into two groups: the winners and the losers in the arena of survival. The winners survive in Coketown, and the losers disappear from the city. The rules controlling the fates of Coketown people are the same as the rules of Darwinian nature. Our Mutual Friend can be interpreted as a matter of money. In the novel, everything is connected with money, and the relationship among people is predation to get money. Money is the central metaphor of the novel and around the money, the characters kill and are killed like the nature of Darwin in which animals kill each other. When a dominant ideology of a particular period permeates ingredients of the society, nobody can escape the controlling power of the ideology. Darwin and Dickens, although they worked in different areas, give evidence that their works are products of the ethos of Victorian England.