Abigail Boucher, Science, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) 237 pp. $119.99 Hb. $16.99 Eb. ISBN: 9783031411403
Abigail Boucher’s Science, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction (2023) aims to address what she terms a ‘remarkable’ lack of scholarship on ‘an entire social class’ – that is, the aristocracy. In particular, she draws readers’ attention to depictions of the upper class’s health in Victorian popular fiction. She focuses on how they were pathologized in popular texts as a way to measure, at least in part, how the general population conceived of them during a time of massive social and economic change. Furthermore, she explores ‘how literary representations of that visually prominent lineage could be used as a safe ‘sandboxing’ exercise for different classes to test out or grapple with new scientific and medical concepts’ (3). These concepts include consumerism and ‘illness and class performativity’ (29), which are discussed in chapter 2, gender norms and fertility, which are discussed in chapter 3, inbreeding and race, which are discussed in chapter 4, and physiognomy and evolution, which are discussed in chapters 5 and 6. While each chapter covers distinct topics and genres of popular fiction, Boucher nicely connects every section and progressively builds ideas across chapters. Published as part of the Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science, and Medicine series, the monograph certainly addresses the intersecting interests of those disciplines, but researchers and students will also find her chapters on silver fork novels and sensation fiction useful in any seminar or study on those genres of Victorian literature.
By Boucher’s own admission, the first half of her book covers genres of Victorian fiction that were very popular but relatively short-lived. Silver-fork novels were popular ‘between the 1820s and mid-1840s before collapsing as a genre and fading almost entirely from the public consciousness’ (29). G.W.M. Reynolds’s Chartist penny fiction, the subject of chapter three, speaks to the interests of a working-class movement that was most active for about a decade. Victorian sensation fiction’s heyday lasted ‘from the late 1850s to the early 1870s’ (112). The genres she covers in her final two chapters, however, ‘are considerably smaller’ than the others featured in the book: the Chivalric Feudal of Ruritania and the Evolutionary Feudal – both ‘products of the Victorian Medieval Revival’ (187). While readers will be, by and large, less familiar with the small group of texts Boucher discusses in chapters five and six, the small scope of these genres means Boucher is able to cover them thoroughly in the space of two chapters. Readers should know that chapters five and six demand to be read together as they discuss interconnected though diverting genres.
Chapter four’s discussion of sensation fiction and endogamy is the most engrossing of the monograph. Boucher skillfully connects texts across science, literature, religion, history, and politics to track how Victorian sensation fiction ‘engaged with genuine medical and scientific discourses around heredity and fertility…as well as ideological concerns about class, race, and disability’ (112). This chapter stands out, in part, because it covers more familiar territory (readers will likely be more well-versed in the fiction of Wilkie Collins than they are in some of the more obscure titles covered in chapters two and three, for example), but it also effectively captures the stakes of these issues. We still grapple with the repercussions of Victorian conceptions of heredity, ancestral privilege, and biological traits. Boucher discusses The Woman in White, Basil, The Moonstone, East Lynne, Lady Adelaide’s Oath, The Surgeon’s Daughters, and Lady Audley’s Secret alongside nineteenth-century works of biology and eugenics, and she makes plain something that other studies have largely ignored the import of: that East Lynne, The Woman in White, and Lady Audley’s Secret ‘unravel a mystery around medical inheritance, making pathological lineage an immediate and almost necessary feature of sensation fiction from its inception’ (132). Boucher’s use of the debate between hard and soft hereditarianism is particularly revealing when applied to her close readings of fictional texts, and her claim that sensation fiction reflects anxieties about ‘a disabled and criminal invasion, which itself is often thinly veiled discourse on racial invasion’ comes through clearly throughout the chapter.
Boucher’s conclusion helpfully situates her work in contemporary discourse about class, heredity, media, and race. While she admits that ‘the aristocracy does not occupy quite as much cultural or political hegemony’ today ‘as they did in the nineteenth century’ (227), Boucher notes that we continue to obsessively pathologize the elite in television series, books, social media, and traditional print media. We comment ‘on their health, (dis)ability, physical features, addictions, inherited traits, and their intersections with classed and raced bodies.’ She continues, ‘Perhaps most pertinent of all… has been the relentless coverage of the British royal family, discussion of which almost always turn to health, lineage, and (pseudo-)science. Their connections to various class groups, to endogamic or exogamic marriage, their weight and attractiveness, their pregnancies and parenting styles, their national and racial backgrounds, their assumed or diagnosed psychological states, their medical problems and lifespans’ (228). Boucher’s book was published prior to the Princess of Wales’s March 2024 announcement of a cancer diagnosis, but the text perfectly narrates why and how public speculation about Catherine’s body would reach such a fever pitch, nonetheless.
While this title is a monograph and not an edited collection, it has features of the latter that make it particularly useful. It has a very detailed table of contents that make it easy to find Boucher’s discussions of individual topics and texts, and each chapter has its own conclusion and works cited. This makes Science, Medicine and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction easy to navigate and use in smaller pieces. This format also makes it ideal for classroom usage as a chapter can easily be excerpted from the whole.
Ellen Stockstill, Penn State
