The Victorian Experience discusses Elizabeth Gaskell's unfinished novel Wives and Daughters and the evolutionary themes and references within the story. Key points: 1) Wives and Daughters explores different social classes in Victorian England and how characters adapt to their environments, reflecting Darwinian evolutionary ideas. 2) The novel references the scientific debates around evolution occurring in the 1860s, with mentions of Darwin's Origin of Species and theorists like Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. 3) The story was meant to conclude with Roger Hamley, a scientist, marrying Molly Gibson, representing their evolutionary success in adapting to their surroundings.

1. The Victorian Experience

3.  Charles Darwin was a cousin on EG’s mother's side and
Gaskell's daughter, Meta, had holidayed with his sister
 Many of Gaskell's friends in both England and France were
as involved in scientific as artistic interests, and serious
journals like the Edinburgh, the Westminster and the
Quarterly discussed scientific subjects
 Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in 1859
and evolution was at the centre of public debate
throughout the 1860s.
 Wives and Daughters is concerned with the slow process of
evolutionary social change

4.  Wives and Daughters’ evolutionary terms of
reference suggest that this bildungsroman is a tale
of adaptation and survival.
 Recent scholarship suggests that Wives and
Daughters “renders visible the pervasive, if
muted, influence of Darwinian evolutionary
theory” (d’Albertis 137) and that Gaskell “adopts a
narrative technique which consistently reveals an
evolutionary perspective” (Debrabant 15).
 Deirdre D'Albertis, Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the
Victorian Social Text (New York, 1997)
 Mary Debrabant
Birds, Bees and Darwinian Survival Strategies in Wives and Daughters
The Gaskell Society Journal – Volume 16 (2002)

5.  pointedly secular frame of
reference,
 a third-person observing narrator,
 an emphasis on ordinary life, and
 a plot in which “characters, like
Darwinian organisms, learn to
adapt to their environments”
(George Levine’s Darwin and the
Novelists (University of Chicago Press,
1988)

6.  Baron Cuvier’s Le Regne Animal (1817) – acknowledges
species extinction, denies evolution
 Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire Transcendental anatomy:
‘All animal life . . . could be strung into a continuous,
related series, rather than broken into Cuvier’s discrete
divisions”
 It is “Geoffroi St. H –” who invites Roger to dinner, wishing
to “meet the author of the paper which had already
attracted the attention of the French comparative
anatomists”
 (Leon Litvack . “Outposts of Empire: Scientific Discovery
and Colonial Displacement in Gaskell's Wives and
Daughters.” Review of English Studies 55 (2004): 727–58. )

7.  George Henry Lewes’ “Studies in Animal Life” ran in
the magazine from January to June 1860:
 ‘ To what extent are animal forms variable? The
answers given have been two: one school declaring
that the extent of variability is limited to those trifling
characteristics which mark the different Varieties of
each Species; the other school declaring that the
variety is indefinite, and that all animal forms may
have arisen from successive modifications of a very few
types, or even of one type’. (Apr. 1860: 444)

9.  1862: the Cornhill addressed Darwinian theory in E. S.
Dixon’s “A Vision of Animal Existences.”
 ‘The blue-robed lady’s green-covered book teaches
that the world of plants and animals is a world of
incessant change, that, in coming ages, every living
thing will be only a metamorphosed shadow of its
former self.’

10.  young middle-class women (Molly and Cynthia),
 the squirearchy (Mr. Hamley and his heir, Osborne),
the merchant class (Mrs. Hamley before her marriage),
 the emergent professional class (Mr. Gibson),
 the aristocracy (the Cumnors),
 the new scientist (Roger Hamley),
 the “nabob” or British class enriched by Indian trade
(Mr. Coxe, who inherits from his uncle),
 the governess (Clare/Mrs. Gibson),
 the spinster (the Miss Brownings)
 the servant (Aime ́e).

11.  “they were not an adventurous race. They never
traded, or speculated, or tried agricultural
improvements of any kind. . . . continuing the
primitive manners and customs of his forefathers . . .
[Squire Hamley] did live more as a yeoman, when such
a class existed, than as a squire of this generation” (ch.
4)
 Note the Darwinian terms
 Cf Preston: ch 30: ‘Old Ways and New Ways’

12.  “What in the world can I do to
secure an income?” thought
Osborne, as he stood on the hearth-
rug, his back to a blazing fire, his
cup of coffee sent up in the rare old
china that had belonged to the Hall
for generations; his dress finished, as
dress of Osborne’s could hardly fail
to be. One could hardly have
thought that this elegant young
man, standing there in the midst of
comfort that verged on luxury,
should have been turning over that
one great problem in his mind; but
so it was. “What can I do to be sure
of a present income?” (269–70; ch.
23)

13.  Roger emerges not only as a ‘man of science’ but also as
an economically resourceful figure, unbound by the
expectations of the first son.
 Lord Hollingford invites Roger (not Osborne or the
Squire) to meet the scientist “Geoffroi St. H –” (ch. 27)
 Roger surpasses Osborne in evolutionary terms.
 Cf Gaskell’s story, “The Half-Brothers” (1859): the weak
younger brother is saved from death in a snowstorm by
his older and tougher half-brother.

14.  In addition to being a
moral man of science,
Roger represents the
novelist, who also studies
“forms unseen,
unsuspected, or unheeded
by the mass of ordinary
men” (Lewes Jan.1860).
 Molly represents Mrs
Gaskell, who came of age
in the 1820s

15. Here the story is broken off, and it can never be finished.
What promised to be the crowning work of a life is a
memorial of death. A few days longer, and it would have
been a triumphal column, crowned with a capital of
festal leaves and flowers: now it is another sort of
column - one of those sad white pillars which stand
broken in the churchyard.
But if the work is not quite complete, little remains to be
added to it, and that little has been distinctly reflected
into our minds. We know that Roger Hamley will marry
Molly, and that is what we are most concerned about.
Indeed, there was little else to tell.

16. ‘Roger and Molly are married; and if one of them is
happier than the other, it is Molly. Her husband has no
need to draw upon the little fortune which is to go to
poor Osborne's boy, for he becomes professor at some
grey scientific institution, and wins his way in the world
handsomely. ..If any one suffers for it, it is Mr Gibson.
But he takes a partner, so as to get a chance of running
up to London to stay with Molly for a few days now and
then, and 'to get a little rest from Mrs Gibson.’ ‘

17. ‘But it is useless to speculate upon what would have been
done by the delicate strong hand which can create no
more Molly Gibsons - no more Roger Hamleys. We have
repeated, in this brief note, all that is known of her
designs for the story, which would have been completed
in another chapter. There is not so much to regret, then,
so far as this novel is concerned; indeed, the regrets of
those who knew her are less for the loss of the novelist
than of the woman - one of the kindest and wisest of her
time.’