Darwin’s Origin of Species [GK26][GK27](1859), despite its almost complete silence about human evolution, was the catalyst for widespread discussion and debate during the 1860s about the history and future of humanity; about slavery and the identity of the human ‘races’; and about competition and struggle in Victorian society. Three popular novels of the early 1860s – George Meredith’s Evan Harrington [GK28](1860), Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations [GK29](1860–61), and Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies [GK30](1862–63) – illustrate how quickly Darwin’s ideas were appropriated into fictions dealing with race and social class in the decade of the American Civil War, the Morant Bay Rebellion, and the Second Reform Bill. Although generally associated with literary realism, Darwin’s work may be better aligned with the new narrative form so popular in the 1860s: sensation fiction.

This chapter investigates the relation of style to the emergent poetics of the novel in the Victorian era. It considers the proximity of 'style' to 'craft' and the way that representations of making in three Victorian novels address the principles and the practices of craft – though rarely are the principles and practices in perfect unison given the 'makeshift creativity' discussed here. What is at stake in these representations is a question about representation itself: namely, whether style is mimetic or whether it may be more excessive, improvisatory or haphazard than that.

Chapter Two, “The Social Life of Crime: Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and Philip Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug” reads the oppositional evolution of criminal justice in England and India by comparing the two novels. I begin with the observation that the movement toward rehabilitation and the humanization of the criminal in nineteenth century England occurs in tandem with the rise of corporal punishment and penal transportation in India. Taking the two novels as instances of this contradictory impulse, I examine the figure of the thug as a cipher for racialized fears of Indian criminality. In particular, I look at representations of paternity and masculinity within both novels. I show that Abel Magwitch becomes humanized in Dickens’s novel by taking on the mantle of fatherhood for Pip. By contrast, Ameer Ali is condemned for his paradigmatic inability to foster a viable childhood. I argue that criminality emerges within a Victorian matrix of race and patriarchy in which to be a father, or father figure, is to be properly human.

This chapter offers a new genealogy of Victorian character by tracing the development and influence of two prominent theories of subject formation that emerged out of the application of political economy to distinct forms of settler imperialism. Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s theory of “systematic colonization” posited a stadialist model of spatial organization as the means of replicating British character, while Alexander Maconochie’s “Mark System” for convict reformation was derived from the temporal logic of bourgeois financial discipline. Their contrasting impacts on the novel demonstrate the complexity and depth of the settler empire’s influence on Victorian culture. Wakefield’s prominent theories spurred a general imaginative expansion of British identity beyond Britain, but the impact of Maconochie’s ideas occurred through more intimate networks of influence. After Charles Dickens adopted the Mark System for his ambitious and long-running philanthropic experiment, Urania Cottage, I argue that it came to infuse his conception of character formation in Great Expectations (1861), notably in the portrayal of Pip, its metropolitan protagonist.