5 - Samuel Butler's symbolic offensives: colonies and mechanical devices in the margins of evolutionary writing

Summary

CULTIVATING THE SINS OF WRITING IN THE FIELD OF EVOLUTIONARY SPECULATION

When contemplating the gentlemen of science in Leslie Stephen's metaphoric theatrical ‘box’, Samuel Butler inclined towards a hermeneutic of suspicion. Writing in 1890 about scientific exposition in the context of what he held to be the theory that ‘deadlocked’ progress in evolutionary thought – the theory of evolution by natural selection, elaborated by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace – Butler remarked that:

we want to know who is doing his best to help us, and who is only trying to make us help him, or to bolster up the system in which his interests are vested. There is nothing that will throw more light upon these points than the way in which a man behaves towards those who have worked in the same field with himself, and, again, than his style.

In looking for the place where the sources of this suspicion were acted out, Butler appealed to the concept of the field; writers worked in fields of intellectual endeavour, synchronically and historically. From the early 1860s, Butler found himself working in the same field as Charles Darwin. In writing about evolution, Butler came to the view that Darwin had failed properly to acknowledge the contributions of those earlier evolutionists who had shaped the common speculative endeavour, in particular Erasmus Darwin, Buffon and Lamarck. Crucially, for Butler, style marked out a writer's distinctive and resonant place in the field.