Victorian science fiction, imperial romance, sensation fiction, and utopian fiction helped readers cope with the immensity of the evolutionary time scale by stories that featured the progressive improvement of the species through the inheritance of acquired characteristics or by planned programs of eugenics. Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race, Haggard’s She, Collins’s The Legacy of Cain, and other works of Victorian genre fiction demonstrate some of the consequences of neo-Lamarckian thinking and serve as a warning to commentators on epigenetics who have suggested that it supports Lamarck’s views. In the hands of novelists, neo-Lamarckism buttressed notions of the inherited character of criminality, the progressive nature of evolution, and the tendency to “blame mothers” for degeneration of the species.

Chapter 3 contends that the crime novels of the Newgate school stage the emergence of novelty, spectacle, and celebrity in the everyday lives of the low-born and ordinary. Newgate novels of the 1830s and 1840s examine how, in an emergent mass media culture, notorious figures and extraordinary actions reverberate through the collective consciousness. I argue that Newgate novelists develop a notion of demotic celebrity, showing how the criminal’s talents and achievements might capture the public’s imagination and bring celebrity within reach of insignificant individuals. Reading W. H. Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830) in relation to William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) and Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–38), the chapter shows that the criminal in these novels is a figure aware of his own visibility and conscious of how best to present himself to an audience. The Newgate novels interest in the production of celebrity reflects the permeation of fashion’s logics of contingency and spectacle into quotidian experience across the social spectrum.