TY - JOUR
AU - Holterhoff,, Kate
AB - Abstract This article considers intersections between the doctrines of mid-Victorian liberalism and biological evolution using 1860s caricatures and satires from Punch. In the years following the 1859 publication of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, caricatures featuring satirical apes illustrated mutually supportive cultural attitudes about politics and science. Ideas of character united the discourses of mid-Victorian evolutionism with liberalism, and the confluence of these ideas, or what I term liberal evolutionism, dramatized this overlap for Victorian culture. My project shows that the apes depicted in Punch were often intended as not only whimsical responses to the theories put forward by Darwin and Mill, they also point to the formation of the British subject. In the ‘Preface’ to the 29 June 1861 volume of Punch, a delegation of African gorillas visits Britain for the purpose of securing an ambassador to observe ‘good gorilla society’.1 The racist implications of ape-led African diplomacy are obvious; the English are better qualified to recognize ‘good’ society among Africans than the native population because Englishmen represent the pinnacle of human culture and civilization. Although the foolish gorillas request that a dog, ‘the honourable TOBY’, fill this post, Mr. Punch alternatively offers his ‘Book’, because to ‘read, study, learn its lessons […] is the physic which I administer to the British variety of Gorilla, and it may be equally beneficial to you’ (p. iv). By offering Punch as a manual of ‘society’ at its best, while suggesting that this periodical appeals to Britain’s own native gorillas, Mr. Punch has turned the mirror of ridicule from disparaging African stereotypes to disparaging the character of modern British subjects. In order to undermine the self-conception of its largely urban, male, and middle-class readership, Mr. Punch allows seemingly urban, male, and middle-class gorillas to bleed into Britons, and vice versa. Although Punch effectively undermines the still inchoate notion of a modern subject, the political, economic, and sociocultural significance of Punch’s satirical apes remains less clear. What precisely are the gorillas in Punch intended to mock? In this article I argue that Punch looked to satirical apes to lampoon complex and overlapping ideas relating to liberalism and evolutionary science in Victorian culture. In the years following the 1859 publication of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, satirical apes in Punch more than any other figure illuminated not merely coinciding, but also mutually supportive, cultural attitudes about politics and science. Humour is particularly appropriate for accessing and critiquing these ideas. As Michael Billig explains, following Daniel Wickberg, during the years leading up to 1870, the emergence of the notion of a sense of humour ‘was linked to a broader change in thinking about the person’ and the ‘enduring characteristics of individuality’.2 Evolution and liberalism are vast and volatile terms, but I suspect they have more in common than cultural critics of the mid-Victorian period typically give them credit for. In order to explore these overlaps in a historically nuanced manner, in this article I limit my consideration of both ideas to specific contexts. First, I situate my project during the 1860s. Political historians have pointed to the extreme importance of the 1860s due to this decade’s position between the first and second Reform Acts, and its ties to the decline, or, more accurately, the shifting significance of British Radicalism.3 Meanwhile, historians of science have identified cultural touchstones during these same years like the American Civil War and the well-publicized African expedition of Paul Du Chaillu to demonstrate this decade’s importance to the discourse of Darwinian evolutionism.4 Second, but relatedly, I confine my analysis to the overlap between Mill’s liberalism and Darwin’s evolutionism. By this I mean that I focus concertedly on the more philosophical aspects of Darwin and Mill’s theories, rather than, say, Herbert Spencer’s brand of evolutionism, or the Liberal Party’s formation and official policies during the 1860s. Third, I trace the ephemeral shared concerns of evolutionary and liberal theory in mid-Victorian culture using caricatures from Punch. This periodical offers a useful gauge of British culture during the 1860s, but it is also uniquely positioned to balance liberal and evolutionary ideas. As historian of science Richard Noakes says: ‘the comedy of Punch often depended on mixing incongruous subjects’.5 Moreover, many Victorians considered this periodical to be significant to the specific issues of liberalism and evolutionary science. William Gladstone illustratively said in an 1893 speech that Punch ‘manifests the Liberal sentiments by which it has been guided from the first’.6 In addition, George Thomas Bettany, although focusing on the 1870s, wrote in his biography of Darwin that it was ‘Mr. Punch, week after week’, who consistently ‘reflected passing opinion’ on the naturalist’s theories.7 I employ Punch’s satirical apes to argue that sites of intersection joining the ideas of liberalism with evolution, or what I term liberal evolutionism, were deeply constitutive during the mid-nineteenth century – particularly as they informed the idea of character. Possibly the most important reason that the satirical ape in post-1859 Punch should not be divorced from ideas of both liberalism and evolution is that it textually embodies notions of character. Lauren Goodlad and Elaine Hadley have worked towards developing a more nuanced account of liberalism in large part by historicizing the idea of character during the nineteenth century. For Victorians, ‘[f]ully developed character […] entails positive liberty – a capacity to pursue self-directed ends beyond that warranted by mere non-interference’.8 Positive liberty has to do with the free and democratic expression of developed individuality, and it was equally important to political theory and the scientific theory of evolution during the 1860s. In Origin, Darwin argues that ‘Divergence of Character’ is necessary to natural selection because: the more diversified the descendants from any one species become in structure, constitution, and habits, by so much will they be better enabled to seize on many and widely diversified places in the polity of nature, and so be enabled to increase in numbers.9 Heterogeneity within a species is not only endemic to the natural order, but beneficial variations are key to the survival of species. The passage of diverse traits from one generation to the next forms the backbone of natural selection because organisms better adapted to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce than those that are less well adapted. In much the same way that natural selection makes a ‘polity of nature’, liberalism upholds diversity within a community because, as Mill says in On Liberty, ‘it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions’, as well as ‘different experiments of living’.10 While the significance of this complex and nuanced facet of mid-Victorian liberal evolutionism is extensive, I have room to study only a few instances of character diversity from Punch satires. Today, Punch is usually considered a bastion of conservatism, often with a Tory bent. Therefore, Gladstone’s late-century prognosis regarding the ‘Liberal sentiments’ of Punch may strike Victorianists as disingenuous, self-serving, or at least wishful thinking on the Liberal politician’s part. There is certainly some justice in the opinion, here stated by historian Henry Miller, that ‘the periodical became more respectable and more conservative in the eighteen-fifties’, but historians should not lose sight of the fact that Punch began as a radical publication in the 1840s and it retained many of these values throughout its extended tenure.11 That Punch published Thomas Hood’s ‘The Song of the Shirt’ in 1843 bears out the fact that many of the men who occupied the Mahogany Table identified as politically and philosophically liberal. Politically Liberal staff members during the 1860s included: Mark Lemon (1809–70), Punch’s editor from 1845 until his death; subeditor Horace ‘Ponny’ Mayhew (1816–72); and Tom Taylor (1817–80, fl. 1842–80), a long-time staff member and editor after the death of Shirley Brooks (1816–74).12 But, as Roger Simpson explains, Punch’s philosophy resided ‘essentially outside of politics’, which enabled it ‘to attack political abuse from whatever quarters it arose’.13 In this article I will show that Punch’s political affiliations depended less on the individual politics of its contributors than their overarching philosophical resistance to dogmatism of any sort. If by liberalism we have in mind Mill’s case for diversity and even eccentricity of opinion, the ambiguous and warring meanings of this periodical’s satires cause them to act in ways that are philosophically liberal and evolutionary on account of the fact they are varied, dynamic, and inclusive. Owing to the interdisciplinary nature of my enquiry, as well as the far-reaching and layered sociocultural material Punch absorbs, I reach outside the conventions of history and social science research to make my claims. In attempting to decipher thinking about politics and science in Victorian culture, my project adopts an approach that can best be categorized as literary and visual cultural studies. I build upon Victorianist criticism by James G. Paradis, Susan David Bernstein, and Janet Browne contending that evolutionary humour after Origin emerged from and furthered taxonomic margin destabilization between apes and humans.14 My study also continues the work begun in Richard Altick’s Punch, which devotes considered attention to this periodical’s treatment of class, politics, and the Condition of England question, but does not extend past 1851.15 Finally, I build on the body of research that has considered the role of evolutionism and liberalism to Whig histories and the cult of progress during the nineteenth century.16 Ideas of liberalism and evolution were central to the discourse of civilization’s advance. Yet, many of these studies overgeneralize Darwinism’s importance to nineteenth-century historiographies dealing with liberalism. Although historians have long recognized the confluence between liberalism and evolution owing to the fact that natural selection could not have arisen without Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), my project contributes to the increasingly specific and focused Victorianist research pertaining to overlaps between the history of science and the history of liberal culture.17 By arguing that Punch’s mid-Victorian satirical ape fulfilled a specific function during the 1860s that was mutually informed by the discourses of Darwinian evolution and Millite liberalism, I suggest that this ape depended in formative ways upon character variety and divergence – ideas which were foundational to emerging understandings of modern subjecthood. Satirical apes are therefore unlike the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century monkey that represented vanity and folly according to theriomorphism, or the practice of using animals allegorically, as is the case in Giambattista della Porta’s De Humana Physiognomia (1586). They also differ from the early nineteenth century’s dandified, aristocratic apes such as Thomas Love Peacock’s Melincourt (1817), featuring Sir Oran Haut-ton, Baronet, a civilized orangutan elected to Parliament, and Isaac D’Israeli’s Flim-Flams! (1805), in which the narrator’s ‘Uncle had long been secretly boarding and educating an orang-outang, and thought he might make him a Christian, out of mere malice to our curate!’.18 During the course of this article I will show that 1860s satirical apes in Punch were often intended as imaginative responses to the theories put forward in Origin and On Liberty, but I also gesture to the significant and less associative issue underlying these caricatures: the formation of the British subject. II. Eccentricity in ‘The Lion of the Season’ Punch’s 1861 ‘The Lion of the Season’ (Figure 1) depicts a human ‘Alarmed Flunkey’ announcing a gorilla as he enters an aristocratic fete.19 This caricature relies in many ways on an ironic reversal because it represents a human as less attractive, subservient to, and all-round inferior to an ape. The rotund ape’s new and well-fitting white tie evening dress, combed and oiled hair, and contented expression make Mr. Gorilla look like a respectable middle-class man of business. Like the bourgeois nouveau riche, this nouveau human is appropriately attired for the drawing room. Of course, Punch’s ape in human clothes is purposefully intended to be unbelievable and even distasteful. Mr. Gorilla’s species’ uncouthness makes him an appropriate symbolic equivalent to fiction’s newly moneyed Merdles, Melmottes, and Veneerings. Like these imagined pretenders to aristocratic society, no amount of polish will make Mr. Gorilla any less ridiculous and repellent. All represent wealthy, upwardly mobile, sumptuously attired, but nonetheless coarse individuals. While the upper echelons of British society may vocally pride themselves on exclusivity, Punch suggests the disingenuousness of this attitude because even an ape may be admitted if he appears affluent. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘The Lion of the Season’, Punch, 25 May 1861, p. 213. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘The Lion of the Season’, Punch, 25 May 1861, p. 213. In the nineteenth-century British literary imagination there was something simian about capital. It is no accident that in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), Grandfather Smallweed’s extortionate use of money to gain a hold over the honourable but impoverished Mr. George is linked to his ‘family likeness to the monkey tribe’.20 Family or educational restrictions seemed powerless to bar distastefully apish but wealthy persons from entering into and advancing in British society. Much as Peacock intends for Sir Oran Haut-ton’s election to Parliament for a rotten borough in Melincourt to satirize failings in Britain’s political system, Dickens’s monkeyish moneylender in Bleak House lampoons the moral defects of Britain’s economic system. While Punch’s ‘Lion’ must be interpreted as contributing to a longstanding tradition in British satire of using modern, civilized, and wealthy apes to lampoon human social foibles, cultural historians must dig deeper to uncover the significance of apishness in ‘Lion’ because affluence became overwritten with new liberal and evolutionary implications after 1859. The critique of bourgeois Victorian society evident in ‘Lion’ extends from Mr. Gorilla to include the lackey, who is equally absurd but in an obviously different way. The lackey’s diminutive stature, pigeon-toed posture, and miserable facial expression mark him as proportionately ridiculous. Compounding his visual insignificance, the lackey ruins the pomp usually afforded to introductions when he stammers ‘Mr. G-G-G-O-O-O-rilla’ (p. 213). The lackey radiates gawkiness and discomfort. His light-coloured hair and beard stand up straight in all directions, communicating a sense of unease and creating a halo effect very much like a lion’s mane. It is unclear whether it stands up because his hair is naturally grizzled and untameable, or whether terror and surprise are alone to blame. Although fear might be natural in a gorilla’s presence, this distinct hairstyle also causes the lackey to resemble popular caricatures of the Irish ‘paddy’. Perhaps the season’s lion is the Irish-looking lackey, and not Mr. Gorilla at all! Illustrated satires of degenerate and uncouth Irishmen appeared frequently in Victorian periodicals, and Punch was particularly merciless in its disdain, but in ‘Lion’ the juxtaposition of ‘paddy’ with gorilla must be interpreted by way of contemporary debates in politics and science. R. F. Foster explains in Paddy and Mr. Punch that since the 1830s, ‘Ireland had been a dominant issue’ in British politics, ‘from Catholic Emancipation to Church reform, from O’Connell’s campaign for Repeal of the Union to the controversial endowment of the Catholic seminary at Maynooth’, but during the 1860s, English attitudes towards the Irish shifted to ‘the fight against Fenianism’.21 Irish nationalism solidified the stereotype of the violent and animalistic Irishman and permeated the popular consciousness in the United Kingdom and the United States alike. Illustratively, in an 1866 letter to American evolutionist Asa Gray, Darwin expressed concern about the recent raid on Campobello Island, New Brunswick, organized by the American Fenian Brotherhood, writing apologetically: ‘I hope all the Fenian row in your country, will not be the cause of more trouble & hatred between our two countries’.22Punch almost invariably portrayed the Irish as uncivilized brutes, but during the 1860s these depictions tended to suggest that Irish brutishness was the consequence of incomplete evolution. As historian Theodore Koditschek says of the ape-like Irish satirized by Punch, ‘[t]he degree of evolutionary backwardness depicted tended to increase during episodes of Fenian terrorism or agrarian violence’.23 It is useful to consider how Punch interwove ideas of liberalism with evolutionary ideas in ‘Lion’ by way of a second but contemporaneous satire dealing with Irish stereotypes. The apparently degenerate Irish lackey in ‘Lion’ bears many similarities to the obviously degenerate ‘creature manifestly between the Gorilla and the Negro’ belonging ‘to a tribe of Irish savages’ from the Punch squib entitled ‘The Missing Link’ (1862).24 Like an unwanted and dangerous animal, ‘Missing Link’ characterizes the Irish as irredeemably boorish and devolved. L. Perry Curtis Jr notes in his seminal history of ‘Victorian images of the Irish, […] the Darwinian debate over evolution, and the art of caricature’, that ideas about the ‘savage’ Irish owed much to the budding science of ethnology, which encouraged even ‘educated and respectable Victorians’ to interpret ‘the “native” Irish as belonging to a distinct order of mankind or “race”’.25 Yet, although Punch alludes to the hierarchical evolutionary significance of race in its depiction of ‘the lowest species of the Irish Yahoo’ in ‘Missing Link’, this satire concludes on a distinctly Millite note (p. 165). After enumerating several violent and foolish behaviours exhibited by these ‘Irish savages’, the author expresses a hope that their discovery will establish ‘the necessity of an enlarged definition of our fellow creatures, conceived in a truly liberal and catholic spirit’ (p. 165). It is likely that Punch, who uses the term ‘catholic’ purposely to denote universality on the one hand, and the very non-English religion of most Irish people on the other, is interested in lampooning the issue of character variety. The inclusive and broadminded ‘liberal […] spirit’ that Punch pastiches is doubtless informed by Mill’s tolerant version of liberalism. Consider his assertion in On Liberty: It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it and calling it forth, within the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation; and as the works partake the character of those who do them, by the same process human life also becomes rich, diversified, and animating, furnishing more abundant aliment to high thoughts and elevating feelings, and strengthening the tie which binds every individual to the race, by making the race infinitely better worth belonging to. (p. 113) ‘Missing Link’ uses an uncouth Irish-Negro-Gorilla to mock the Millite notion that ‘rich, diversified, and animating’ characters are desirable in all mankind. What is more, Punch likely had in mind this political economist’s well-known and not uncontroversial sympathy with Ireland’s inhabitants. In the Principles of Political Economy (1848), for example, Mill wrote compassionately about the Irish by rejecting as ‘a bitter satire on the mode in which opinions are formed’ English notions regarding the ‘indolence and insouciance in the Celtic race’.26 Although Mill was far from immune to racial stereotypes, he claimed that English negligence and mishandling caused the greater portion of Ireland’s misfortunes, and not ‘the backwardness of Irish industry, and the want of energy of the Irish people in improving their condition’.27 Because diversity augments the beauty and nobility of the human race, it would seem that Mill’s ideal liberal society would adopt the ‘enlarged definition of our fellow creatures’ maligned in ‘Missing Link’ through the inclusion of the Gorilla, Negro, and Irish. Punch deliberately ridicules the idea of Millite tolerance without absolutely discrediting it. The ‘Irish Yahoo’ is inevitably framed in terms of ‘the lowest species’ in all Punch squibs, but in ‘Missing Link’ and ‘Lion’ alike, it also serves to unmask the Janus-face of a ‘liberal and catholic spirit’. If the liberal and democratic reforms which benefited so much of Punch’s audience by enfranchising an ever greater portion of the middle class are premised upon advocating varieties of character, then including as viable subjects all races, creeds, classes, genders – and possibly even species – is unavoidable. Read in terms of Millite liberalism and Darwinian evolution, ‘Lion’ moves beyond the more passive ideas about social tolerance and an acceptance of difference articulated in ‘Missing Link’, and instead advocates the cultivation of active and pronounced idiosyncrasy. Importantly, mid-Victorian liberal evolutionism offers an explanation of why Mr. Gorilla upsets the lower class, racially Irish, and evolutionarily backwards servant more than the likely racially Anglo-Saxon hosts that we assume named him lion and provided him with a social invitation. The lackey’s discomfort in accepting a new breed of master, no matter how genteel and impeccable his demeanour, acts as a critique of his inadaptability. His character is savage because it is immobile; he lacks Millite ‘eccentricity’, or what Darwin termed ‘Divergence of Character’. If the gorilla’s uncouthness in ‘Lion’ is reframed as eccentricity, and valued as a facet of positive individuality, then this ape’s challenge to tradition and propriety acts as a liberal evolutionary adaptation. In On Liberty, Mill argues: it is desirable […] that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained (pp. 120–21) This advocacy of extreme originality also appears in Origin. Darwin contends that diversity, and even extreme aberration, is absolutely essential to species survival, because: ‘as a general rule, the more diversified in structure the descendants from any one species can be rendered, the more places they will be enabled to seize on, and the more their modified progeny will be increased’ (p. 119). Darwin equates ‘The advantage of diversification in the inhabitants of the same region’ to French zoologist Henri Milne Edwards’s theory of ‘the physiological division of labour’ from Introduction à la zoologie générale (1851) (p. 115). Although Milne Edwards’s research concentrated on physiology at an organismal level, Darwin applied these same ideas to entire species. He recognized the advantage a variety of adaptations created for filling the variety of environment types on earth. More adaptable species are also those most likely to survive and reproduce. Historian of science Silvan Schweber calls the ‘Divergence of Character’ section the ‘high point of the Origin of Species’ because it moves beyond merely confirming that the transmutation of species occurs, and introduces concern regarding natural selection’s mechanism, or, more simply, how species evolution works.28 The notion of evolution’s mechanism preoccupied evolutionists throughout the nineteenth century, and would remain unresolved until the Evolutionary Synthesis of natural selection with Mendelian genetics in the 1930s and 40s. Darwin felt certain that ‘Divergence of Character’, an idea he would further develop in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), was central to this mystery, but he could never establish precisely in what way.29Punch gleefully takes up the question by suggesting variety’s value as a distinctly cosmopolitan means of adaptation and survival. Punch’s Gorilla appears well-dressed and successful because, much like his arboreal cousins in Africa, he has successfully adapted to nineteenth-century London’s environment of the modern marketplace. The lackey cannot adapt so he appears recidivistic and bestial. Punch illustrates a liberal evolutionary romance in which an ape’s success is the direct consequence of working harder, and adapting more quickly, than his peers. The ape’s developed eccentricity possibly explains why Mr. Gorilla resembles a lion less than Punch’s lackey. Morphologically, lions are less evolved than humans or apes, and they therefore comprise an undesirable species aspirant. Although symbolically elevated by its royal adoption, the lion’s nineteenth-century genus Felis does not demonstrate the same level of evolutionary progress as the Primate order, of which humans and gorillas claim membership. By comparing man, ape, and lion, Punch plays the literary and historical significance of these animals against their newer Darwinian meaning. The discourses of liberalism and evolutionism mandate a greater acceptance of difference, and Punch exaggerates rather than diminishes this modern necessity’s unpleasantness. It is no compliment to Mr. Gorilla’s hosts that these unseen persons do not suffer from their servant’s inadaptability to the new order of mid-Victorian diversity, industry, and primate evolution. In fact, these imagined hosts provide an intentional contrast to Punch’s readers. Regardless of liberal sympathies, 1861 audiences likely identified with the shaken and savage looking lackey more so than Mr. Gorilla’s exceptionally open-minded host. ‘Lion’ incites readers to question their own tolerance for eccentricity at the same time as they normalize it. III. Individuality in ‘Monkeyana’ ‘Monkeyana’ (1861) – possibly the nineteenth century’s most recognizable satire to comment on mid-Victorian evolutionism – synthesizes ideas relating to Millite liberalism with the transmutation of species in this text’s visual and verse portions (Figure 2).30 The poem in ‘Monkeyana’, supposedly written in the ‘Zoological Gardens’ by ‘Gorilla’, takes a long view of the history of evolutionism, but is clearly motivated by Darwin’s reinvigoration of this theory, as well as current political events (p. 206). For instance, ‘Monkeyana’ lists several scientific texts, personages, and events central to addressing evolutionism in humans and apes, beginning with Robert Chambers’s; The Vestiges taught, That all came from naught By ‘development’, so called, ‘progressive’; That insects and worms Assume higher forms By modification excessive Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘Monkeyana’, Punch, 18 May 1861, p. 206. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘Monkeyana’, Punch, 18 May 1861, p. 206. and followed by Origin: Then Darwin set forth In a book of much worth, The importance of ‘nature’s selection’; How the struggle for life Is a laudable strife, And results in ‘specific distinction’. (p. 206) While scientists wrestle with the mechanism of change, from Chambers’s cosmic transmutation to Darwin’s natural selection, Punch focuses on the certainty of variability in ‘Monkeyana’. The words ‘progressive’ and ‘modification’ reveal scientific evolution’s innate mobility, but the ‘laudable’ quality of ‘strife’ written into natural selection’s ‘struggle for life’ suggests the overarching theme of contentiousness which permeates every stanza in this poem. The momentum of ‘Monkeyana’ depends upon the animosity between evolutionists, as one theory replaces another. Yet, the constant shifting this antagonism signifies is lateral: arguments remain and no side ever prevails. The notion that debate is the way of the world comes particularly to light in the final six stanzas. Nearly half of ‘Monkeyana’ is devoted to one argument over a small fold in the brain called the hippocampus minor, which Richard Owen said was unique to humans, but Thomas Henry Huxley claimed also appears in apes.31 Evolutionists like Huxley used the hippocampus minor to forward the proposition that humans and apes share a common ancestor. In ‘Monkeyana’, the notion that argument and struggle cannot be disentangled from the subject of evolution is more important than verifying any specific scientific position. This satire refuses to weigh-in on the merits of Chambers, Darwin, or Huxley’s various theories of evolution. Instead of resolving the primate’s relationship to human beings, the author of ‘Monkeyana’ lampoons all positions then bids readers an abrupt ‘Adieu’ (p. 206). Why does Punch choose to leave the issues mocked in ‘Monkeyana’ unresolved? Additionally, in a text focused on arguments, can cultural historians determine what argument Punch is making? Beyond the interpretive relativism that ‘Monkeyana’ encourages amongst audiences, which makes it not unlike ‘Lion’, irresolution permits this satirical ape to forward a liberal evolutionary attitude towards independent and autarkic individualism. As Mill famously explains, ‘the appropriate region of human liberty’ includes first, ‘liberty of thought and feeling’; second, ‘liberty of tastes and pursuits’; and third, social liberty which follows from the previous two types of individual liberty, namely, ‘freedom to unite, for any purpose not involving harm to others’ (pp. 26–27). In ‘Monkeyana’, Punch seems to mock the third aspect of liberty, which necessarily arises out of the first two: society must be combative when all persons are encouraged to cultivate and promulgate their own opinions. This cacophony of voices is necessarily contentious, but Punch suggests that it is also without purpose. The hippocampus minor dispute underscores with particular clarity the notion that civil debate is less about finding a common ground than it is about holding on to one’s original opinion, unswayed by the opposition. It is for this reason that Punch quotes Huxley’s closing words from his debate with Owen in the Athenaeum: In taking leave of this discussion, I may be permitted to add, that I shall hereafter deem it unnecessary to take cognizance of assertions opposed to my own knowledge, to the concurrent testimony of all other original observers, and already publicly and formally refuted. Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once.32 Of course, Punch never concerns itself with weighing the merits of Owen and Huxley’s testimony, and instead cherry-picks one line from Huxley’s article, ‘“To twice slay the slain”’ (p. 206), in order to ridicule the bullheadedness of shutting down a conversation without fully resolving it. Not surprisingly, considering the unflattering depiction of evolutionists in ‘Monkeyana’, less than a week after this satire’s publication Darwin wrote to Huxley: ‘I did not think it very good’.33 Punch mocks liberal evolutionary individualism for falsely promising progressive, free debate. This aspect of Punch’s satire appears most visibly in the graphic portion of ‘Monkeyana’, in which an upright gorilla, which we assume to be the author, wears a sandwich board reading, ‘Am I a Man and Brother?’ (p. 206). Here, Punch is once again more concerned with posing questions than making its agenda clear, but the historical provenance of this question suggests that liberty of action, and not merely liberty of opinion, should be understood as an ongoing theme in this text. ‘Monkeyana’ plays on the abolitionist slogan ‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’ in order to suggest that discrimination against the ape possesses similarities to the enslavement of non-white peoples perpetrated by Europeans and Americans. Because apes are not literally subjected to slave labour, Punch’s intent is probably to lampoon evolution’s impact on the question of slavery among the non-Anglo-European races. Although outlawed officially in the United Kingdom after 1833, slavery remained a controversial issue that received renewed popular interest during the years leading up to and following the American Civil War (1861–65). It is worth noting that although many members of Britain’s Liberal Party during the 1860s sided with the North, British mill owners depended on southern states for raw cotton imports, and a number of industrialists balked at the seemingly tyrannical relationship with the South imposed by the federal government of the United States. ‘Monkeyana’ is clearly responding to the recent outbreak of the Civil War in America which challenged the hierarchical, master-slave relationship between the human races: a relationship already exacerbated by the Darwinian ethnological debates between polygenists, who theorized that the so-called human races belonged to different and separate species, and monogenists, who contended that humans originated from a common ancestor (meaning that all human races are the same species). As a native of Africa, the ape in ‘Monkeyana’ is aligned with the plight of humans of African descent, who according to Thomas Carlyle’s argument in ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’ (1849), as a race, are naturally well adapted to a perpetual serfdom because they lack the intellect and character to labour of their own accord as freemen.34 In the years surrounding America’s Civil War, pseudo-scientific thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic looked to biology and ethnography to justify and condemn the institution of slavery. Without choosing a side, ‘Monkeyana’ eagerly asks how the discourses of evolutionism and liberalism can help to elucidate slavery’s stakes. This caricature deals in degrees and definitions, not determining the truth or falsehood of humanity’s increasingly passé, if never fully uncontroversial, apishness. I therefore look to the gorilla’s accoutrements of staff and sandwich board depicted in this Punch satire to unravel the significance of the discourses of liberalism and evolutionism to ‘Monkeyana’. The gorilla’s staff in ‘Monkeyana’ divorces this ape from stereotypical abolitionist depictions of Africans as docile supplicants or serfs in bondage because this object suggests action. A staff could be a crutch keeping the gorilla upright until he completely evolves into a biped, or it could be a cudgel to menace humanity into yielding the rights and freedoms due to a brother. In fact, contemporary scientific texts discussing the gorilla suggest both were true. In Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (1861), Paul Du Chaillu recounts multiple instances in which gorillas defended themselves against other animals such as leopards and elephants by ‘breaking down a tree’ and using it as ‘a club’ to combat, and sometimes slay opponents.35 Alternately, in an 1859 paper read to the Zoological Society of London, Richard Owen explains: ‘the Gorilla is said to walk semi-erect, with the aid of his club, but with a waddling awkward gait; when without a stick, he has been seen to walk as a biped, with his hands clasped across the back of his head, instinctively so counterpoising its forward projection’.36 The symbol of the club as weapon and means of forward progress is manifold, but whether its function is martial or ambulatory matters less than its symbolic function of an aid to the busy and energetic life required of Britain’s modern subjects. In addition to his staff, Punch demonstrates the ape’s activeness in ‘Monkeyana’ by having him don that staple of nineteenth-century commercial advertising: an over-the-shoulder sandwich board. The vocation the ape in ‘Monkeyana’ illustrates is not only expedient for giving voice to a mute creature; it is also a provocative one in the nineteenth-century history of labour. William Booth describes these workers in his In Darkest England (1890) as ‘one of the most wretched classes of the community’ because they lack a union and are beholden to the middlemen at advertising firms.37 Despite pitifully low remuneration, the firms preying on these ‘poor fellows who perambulate the streets as Sandwich Men’ were evidently glutted with an eligible workforce.38 In Street Life in London (1877), Adolphe Smith explains that London’s ubiquitous ‘boardmen’ came to be synonymous with not only wretched poverty, but also the job any person can fill, ‘for, whatever the nature of their previous occupation, none could pretend that they were incapable of carrying boards’.39 For Booth and Smith, boardmen represented work’s ubiquity, as well as its often-dehumanizing futility in a free market economy. The objectification and debasement of these labourers destabilized the ideal of a meritocracy by throwing into question the notion that busyness and labour naturally distinguished more qualified and deserving individuals above others. In fact, the sandwich board visibly obscures and subordinates any individual that carries it, both literally and figuratively. The satirists of Punch drew attention to the contradictory conspicuousness of boardmen on London thoroughfares on the one hand, with the board’s function as agent of degrading concealment on the other. The ‘boardgorilla’ in ‘Monkeyana’ foregrounds the virtuous because energetic character of this ape, rather than his low species, by literally allowing his chosen work to disguise his species identity. Perhaps Punch dresses the gorilla in ‘Monkeyana’ in a sandwich board to underscore his praiseworthy individuality, and the justice of accepting apes into the human, and even Anglo-Saxon, family. If all species denominations are impermanent and therefore ripe for improvement, then Victorians should not necessarily relegate apes to a low rung on evolution’s ladder. Goodlad explains that ‘[s]elf-development is of particular importance to the liberal affirmation of a prescriptive view of character – a notion of subjectivity premised on the limitless improvability of human beings regardless of descriptive features such as class, race, or nationality’.40 I add evolutionary disadvantages to this list of features because species evolution opened self-development to modern apes as well as humans. Evolution depends on survival and reproduction and, according to many liberals, the mark of civilization was a society in which the individual’s accumulation of wealth through participation in the market permitted this successful outcome. Punch lampoons the notion that in order to become part of civilized society apes and humans alike must adapt to the rules of energy and commerce. The most sanguine interpretation of liberal evolution suggests that, through constant work, a superior individual can expedite species and social change to achieve marvellous and perhaps limitless progress. Many of the apes in Punch possess an admirable if ridiculous work ethic that brings them economic success. The upwardly mobile ape acts as a jumping off point to both critique and applaud liberal evolutionism. Nothing bars primates in possession of sufficient willpower from social and species advancement. IV. Democracy in ‘Where Such Things Are Bought’ The gorilla in ‘Where Such Things Are Bought’ (1862) visually signifies the liberal values of character eccentricity, individualism, and energy common to Punch’s satirical apes, but it also draws attention to Darwinism and Millite liberalism’s complex relationship with democracy (Figure 3).41 The visual portion of ‘Bought’ depicts a clothed gorilla climbing the stairs of the British Museum towards a door marked ‘Gray Visitors’ (p. 27). The sign refers to natural history curator John Edward Gray (1800–75), a man renowned in the scientific community for assembling the museum’s world-class zoological specimen collection. The gorilla’s legs are spread widely and mid-stride as he advances towards the door. His dramatically angled posture, combined with the artist’s fuzzy and gestural line quality, vibrates kinetically. Viewers observe the gorilla amid a literal and figurative forward step. With his right hand the gorilla grasps a branch that apparently serves him much as the staff serves the ape in ‘Monkeyana’: as a tool enabling mobility and action. The ape is Gray’s ‘Visitor’; he is not an objectified specimen. ‘Bought’ visually underscores the satirical ape’s individualistic and energetic character, but his rustic, if not uncivil, appearance simultaneously dramatizes the role of inclusivity necessary to the scientific and political philosophies of Mill and Darwin. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘Where Such Things Are Bought’, Punch, 18 January 1862, p. 27. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘Where Such Things Are Bought’, Punch, 18 January 1862, p. 27. Punch explicitly ridicules the Victorian bourgeois character by rusticating the commercial establishment and levelling all consumers using the democratic, but often unscrupulous, forum of the marketplace. The idea of commerce is central to ‘Bought’. In addition to this caricature’s mercantile title, ‘Bought’ emphasizes the idea of deceitful salesmanship and plagiarized products explicitly in this image’s accompanying text: ‘We acknowledge that the Gorilla Portrait Sell is not a bad one’ (p. 27). On one hand, ‘sell’ signifies vending merchandise for a set price. Yet, more mischievously, sell is also a slang term meaning, ‘a planned deception, hoax, [or] take-in’.42 This second sense seems to factor into the remainder of the accompanying text of ‘Bought’, which continues: but neater than the Sell was the classical reply of one of Mr. Punch’s young men, to whom a stranger proffered the Portrait. Putting it aside, unopened, and smiling with lofty superiority, Mr. Punch’s Young Man said ‘Nos etiam in Arcadiâ’ – ‘I too have been in the Lowther Arcade’. (p. 27) The meaning and real-world referents for Punch’s neat ‘Sell’ are manifold. Most importantly for my argument are Du Chaillu’s book sales for Explorations; the retail of (likely counterfeit) cartes-de-visite souvenir portraits; and the community of evolutionists’ attempts to ‘sell’ the theory of species transmutation, and specifically human descent from apes, to the general public. At its most literal, Punch expected most contemporary readers to recognize that the ‘Gorilla Portrait Sell’ referred to Gray’s 1861 epistolary critique of Explorations published in the Athenaeum that ‘[t]he illustration of the skeleton of the Gorilla’ which Du Chaillu has passed off as an authentic portrait of a Gabon Gorilla is, in fact, ‘copied from a photograph made by Mr. [Roger] Fenton for the Trustees of the British Museum (from the skeleton of the animal in the British Museum), which is now sold, at the South Kensington Museum, for a few pence’ (Figure 4).43 This plagiarized ‘Portrait’ is just one point extracted from Gray’s long list of grievances against Du Chaillu’s book, which he dismissively calls ‘New Traveller’s Tales’, and this gorilla portrait is just one illustration of several that Gray points to as falsely attributed. For instance, Gray says that the frontispiece of Explorations ‘is copied from M. I. Geoffroy St.-Hilaire’s figure of the Gorilla, published in the Archives du Museum for 1858, from the specimens in the Paris Museum’.44 Forged illustrations concern Gray because these images permit Du Chaillu to push a false and unscientific depiction of the natural world. Gray complains: ‘there is the same exaggeration in the illustrations (which have evidently been prepared in this country from the notes of the author, and not from sketches on the spot) as there is in the text’.45 In short, copied photographs and illustrations are a symptom of Du Chaillu’s ongoing professional charlatanism, which included the sale of poor quality and likely second-hand taxidermy gorillas to the British Museum (much to Gray’s annoyance), as well as the often completely fabricated natural history narratives in Explorations.46 Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Left, Roger Fenton, ‘Skeleton of a human and a gorilla, displayed side by side’ 1854–58. Albumen print. Right, ‘Skeletons of Man and the Gorilla’, from Paul Du Chaillu, Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (London: John Murray, 1861), p. 370. Roger Fenton’s photograph is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by Wellcome Images <http://catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org/record=b1577008> [accessed 12 May 2015]. Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Left, Roger Fenton, ‘Skeleton of a human and a gorilla, displayed side by side’ 1854–58. Albumen print. Right, ‘Skeletons of Man and the Gorilla’, from Paul Du Chaillu, Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (London: John Murray, 1861), p. 370. Roger Fenton’s photograph is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by Wellcome Images <http://catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org/record=b1577008> [accessed 12 May 2015]. Unlike Gray, Punch focuses on the gorilla’s portrait less as a critique of proper scientific methodologies than as part of this periodical’s ongoing interest in liberalism and evolution, and specifically the democratizing commercial medium of the cartes-de-visite. Celebrity cartes were ripe for derision by means of the satirical ape because these objects intertwined in complex and significant ways with the nineteenth-century British social hierarchy. As Victorianist John Plunkett explains: ‘during the 1860s and 1870s, the supply of celebrity cartes was saturated by those of royalty, politicians, artists and the leading clergy’.47 Therefore, counting a gorilla amongst these respectable portrait sitters clearly mocked this paradoxically elite form of mass-produced portraiture. Origin apotheosized Darwin and his apes to celebrity status, but the apes’ implicit social elevation had the converse effect of lowering more aristocratic celebrities. Counting the Gorilla among the ranks of widely distributed celebrity cartes undermined the positions of more powerful and genteel sitters. The celebrity ape merely confirmed what the form of the carte demonstrated to be true: from their inception cartes possessed the seeds of democracy because ‘all sitters were equal in the sense that all commodities were equal […] the individuality and social status of distinguished sitters were alienated by being reduced to the exchange-value of their photograph’.48 Because cartes were consumable by collectors of all classes they symbolized an act of social levelling. In fact, the already low cost of cartes was reduced further by their rampant counterfeiting prior to the institution of more stringent copyright rules in July 1862 – approximately six months after the publication of ‘Bought’. No amount of respectability could keep images of the brightest lights in Europe from succumbing to imitation’s equalizing influence. Ape and monarch alike were subject to the collectible photograph’s double-edged facility for creating and affirming celebrity at the same time that commoditization of one’s image lessened the sitter’s exclusiveness, mystique, and desirability. The location where cartes could be purchased added to the democracy of the ‘Gorilla Portrait Sell’. Mr. Punch’s mistranslated Latin phrase, which should read ‘We too in Arcadia’ but instead uses a singular pronoun and cites the commercial district of Lowther Arcade, not only pokes fun at the ignorance of ‘Mr. Punch’s Young Man’: it also suggests ties between the wild and bucolic arcadia and London’s bustling commercial districts. These parallels are provocatively and humorously antithetical. In fact, it is probable that Punch is paraphrasing the more popular axiom Et in Arcadia ego, which William Hazlitt translates from Nicolas Poussin’s 1630 and 1650 paintings as ‘I also was an Arcadian’.49 The writers of Punch gleefully turn the sombre and romantic idea that previous generations have enjoyed the earth and passed away topsy-turvy in ‘Bought’. This satire pushes the surprising combination of rural and urban by using the steps of the British Museum to depict not only a bestial ape, but also a bird, which doubles as the text’s initial ‘W’, and which mistakes the ape’s walking stick for a treetop perch.50 The implication is that the arcade where gorilla portraits can be purchased, and the exotic-pastoral African jungles to which he is a native, are both a type of lush and variegated Arcadia appropriate as habitats for humans and apes alike. Punch’s pun between arcade and arcadia is not particularly novel. In 1853 George Augustus Sala made this linguistic connection the basis for an entire article in Household Words.51 For the middle classes, arcades acted as a sort of Green World because their almost supernatural fecundity represented the richness and promise of the capitalist system’s extension. Following the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition London’s glass-roofed arcades became emblematic of consumerism, that hallmark of capitalist modernity at the same time as they made it artistic and fairylike. Walter Benjamin, the most important historian of bourgeois life, devoted years to his grand, unfinished, and dreamlike Das Passagen-Werk (Arcades Project, 1927–40): a text which uses nineteenth-century Parisian arcades, les passages, as a means of historicizing and understanding capitalism, crowds, and modernity. Arcades sold intangibles such as character and status in addition to material goods, and the historic relevance of arcades depended in part on their role as sites of social inclusion. Benjamin calls arcades ‘the hollow mould from which the image of “modernity” was cast’ as well as the ‘[d]ream houses of the collective’ because these locations in some sense created capitalism’s subjects out of all peoples regardless of class, gender, race, and ability.52 In fact, ‘Bought’ mentions the Lowther Arcade specifically owing to this arcade’s unique capacity for inclusivity and levelling. The Lowther Arcade predominantly served the petit bourgeois, but it became particularly well known as a site of social passing. Completed in 1831, the Lowther Arcade was a portion of John Nash’s expansive architectural development of the West Strand. The arcade comprised a glass-roofed ‘tube of shops running from St. Martin’s Churchyard into the Strand’, and it was distinguished from other London arcades by its sale of ‘Toys, Jewellery, and Minor Utilities’. City planners intended for the Lowther Arcade and surrounding development to extend West End commerce eastwards, and thereby open this area of London to a greater number of the middle and upper classes. Yet, despite these intentions, after 1848 Lowther typically served the lower-middle classes. Art historian Jo Briggs suggests that the West End in general provided the ‘setting in which the gent and his female companions could stage their performances of class, and consumption and display were important aspects of this’.53 This distinction made Lowther appealing to English bohemians – London’s closest equivalent to the Parisian flâneur – which accounts for self-described ‘ultra-Bohemian’ Sala’s particular delight in this arcade.54 Although its novelty toys and fake jewellery were obviously garish and cheap, Sala defends the ‘fictitious gems that have their abode in the arcade of Lowther […] because my pretty tradesman’s daughter, my humble milliner or sempstress; even my comely cook, housemaid, or damsel of all work cannot afford the real barbaric pearl and gold’.55 This arcade has dramatic implications for my discussion of liberal evolutionism because it fostered a sense of class mobility. In Lowther Arcade, artificial respectability and wealth are as viable as their actual presence. Darwin’s Origin abandons pretensions of exclusiveness or species purity, explaining that ‘the modified descendants of any one species will succeed by so much the better as they become more diversified in structure, and are thus enabled to encroach on places occupied by other beings’ (p. 116). All life is relational and adaptive. Those best modified for their environments tend to succeed. Because the Lowther Arcade cultivated playacting, this location intersects significantly with Darwinian ideas of character diversity. Darwin seemed to suggest that apes and humans alike be vouchsafed social, political, and economic liberties, and not handicapped as ‘low’ because, to quote Darwin’s famous conclusion to Origin, ‘from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved’ (p. 490). Modern democracy guaranteed that, provided with adequate freedoms, individuals possessing energy should be able to advance despite their inherited ‘low’ species or social station. In 1860s London, the Lowther Arcade, however ridiculous, was a liberating space because it acted as a falsifying realm of plasticity and playacting. The ongoing ladder of life ensured the possibility of progressive development, but Punch employs the satirical ape to make it ridiculous. The notion of this ‘counterfeiting of class’ pairs with forged portrait cartes, because Origin suggested that apes are a sort of counterfeit because only partially evolved human.56 Apes are an emblematic celebrity for the petit bourgeois patrons of Lowther Arcade. Like the successfully ascended ape, acting as capitalism’s proper subject resulted in social ascent and levelling. The sale of goods was always secondary to the sale of character in London’s arcades. V. Conclusion The ape’s visual likeness to humans, noted centuries prior, gained new resonance after 1859 through the discourses of evolution and liberalism. In fact, in this article I have argued that the visualization strategies espoused by Punch’s illustrators in many respects reify the divergence of character that liberal evolutionism requires. Although mid-Victorian ape caricatures engage with a wide variety of contemporary social and political issues, ranging from the American Civil War to urban planning in London, the gorillas depicted in these satires seem to express ideas about liberal evolutionary character. I am particularly interested in how the ape’s appearance – the visual impact of his attire and posture – overwrites audience interpretations of this recurrent, but never repeated, figure. Punch’s apes are rarely interchangeable because they embody the quality of character diversity. The dynamism and rustic attire of Gray’s apish guest has no place in the genteel drawing room depicted in ‘Lion’, and the brutish gorilla in ‘Monkeyana’, no matter how honourable and productive his intentions, is an inappropriate visitor to the British Museum. In a sense, eccentricity of artistic expression overlaps with the satirical ape’s theatrical mutability. Punch’s satirical apes in ‘The Lion of the Season’, ‘Monkeyana’, and ‘Where Such Things Are Bought’ all ridiculed and adopted, often at the same moment, contemporary political, economic, and scientific debates, but the specific intersections between On Liberty and Origin relating to the emerging mid-Victorian ideas about character which I use Punch to identify are in many ways extensible. To begin with, further research into the satirical ape could productively trace liberal evolutionism in later decades, and particularly in the wake of Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) and Mill’s Autobiography (1873). Next, while I point to Punch as exemplar of liberal evolutionism, other British satirical periodicals such as Fun and Public Opinion, as well as comic pamphlets including Richard Grant White’s The Fall of Man: or, the Loves of the Gorillas. A Popular Scientific Lecture Upon the Darwinian Theory of Development by Sexual Selection. By a Learned Gorilla (1871), all feature satirical apes, and all possess overlaps with the discourses of liberalism and evolutionism. In addition, although I have identified and assessed distinct intersections between the philosophies of Darwin and Mill relating to mid-Victorian ideas about character, a broader discussion of the emerging concepts of liberalism and evolution would doubtless generate rich parallels outside my own limited claims. Finally, while I define character in a nuanced and polyvalent manner in the context of On Liberty and Origin, I still only scratch the surface of a complicated and important concept which, according to Stefan Collini: ‘enjoyed a prominence in the political thought of the Victorian period that it had certainly not known before and that it has, arguably, not experienced since’.57 Owing to the complexities inherent to the idea of character, while this study surely contributes to a conversation that numerous scholars of nineteenth-century history are working to unravel, it is not an endpoint. My discussion of character, which brings together the discourses of visual cultural studies, the history of science, and political theory, has perhaps the greatest repercussions for ongoing critical conversations about modernity, and especially the modern subject. The apes caricatured in Punch lampooned ideas about eccentricity, energy, individualism, and inclusion – hallmarks of character which later historians would tie to notions of subjecthood, and which were all the more pointed because they were created to lampoon not only some targeted sociocultural or political event, but also and invariably, as a pastiche of London’s urban, male, and middle-class ‘British variety of Gorilla’.58 Acknowledgements I am grateful to Dan Bivona, Lauren Goodlad, Jon Klancher, Nicole Lobdell, and Harriet Ritvo for their criticism and encouragement on earlier drafts of this article. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. 1. " ‘Preface’, Punch, 29 June 1861, pp. iii–iv (p. iv). Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text. 2. " Michael Billig, Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour (London: Sage, 2005), p. 12. See also Daniel Wickberg, The Senses of Humour (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 18. 3. " See Miles Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism, 1847–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 8–9. 4. " For more on the relationship between slavery in the United States and evolutionary ethnology see Seymour Drescher, ‘The Ending of the Slave Trade and the Evolution of European Scientific Racism’, Social Science History, 14 (1990), 415–50. For a study of du Chaillu’s importance to evolutionary science see Joel Mandelstam, ‘Du Chaillu’s Stuffed Gorillas and the Savants from the British Museum’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 48 (1994), 227–45. 5. " Richard Noakes, ‘Punch and Comic Journalism in Mid-Victorian Britain’, in Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical, ed. by Geoffrey N. Cantor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 91–122 (p. 107). 6. " M. H. Spielmann, The History of ‘Punch’ (London: Cassell and Company, 1895), p. 100. 7. " G. T. Bettany, Life of Charles Darwin (London: Walter Scott, 1887), p. 123. 8. " Lauren Goodlad, ‘“Character Worth Speaking of”, Individuality, John Stuart Mill’, Victorians Institute Journal, 36 (2008), 7–45 (p. 13). Goodlad is responding here to Elaine Hadley, ‘The Past is a Foreign Country: The Neo-Conservative Romance with Victorian Liberalism’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 10 (1997), 7–38. 9. " Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859), pp. 111–12. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text. 10. " John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: John W. Parker, 1859), p. 101. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text. 11. " Henry Miller, ‘The Problem with Punch’, Historical Research, 82 (2009), 285–302 (p. 289). 12. " Arthur A. Adrian, Mark Lemon: First Editor of ‘Punch’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 41; Patrick Leary, The Punch Brotherhood, Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London (London: British Library, 2010), pp. 23, 38–39. 13. " Roger Simpson, Sir John Tenniel: Aspects of his Work (London: Associated University Presses, 1994), p. 108. 14. " James G. Paradis, ‘Satire and Science in Victorian Culture’, in Victorian Science in Context, ed. by Bernard Lightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 143–78; Susan David Bernstein, ‘Ape Anxiety: Sensation Fiction, Evolution, and the Genre Question’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 6 (2001), 250–71; Janet Browne, ‘Darwin in Caricature: A Study in the Popularisation and Dissemination of Evolution’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 145 (2001), 496–509. 15. " Richard Altick, Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841–1851 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997), p. 185. 16. " See Michael Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 127; John Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 129; Theodore Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 206–62. 17. " Some critical discussions of evolution and liberalism include: John Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (London: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 108–18; Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 333–37, 382–414; Robin Gilmour, The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context, 1830–1890 (New York: Longman, 1993), pp. 155–62; Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 206–7; and Michael Levin, J. S. Mill on Civilization and Barbarism (New York: Routledge, 2004) pp. 68–69. 18. " Thomas Love Peacock, Melincourt, 3 vols (London: T. Hookham, 1817); Isaac D’Israeli, Flim-Flams! or, The Life and Errors of My Uncle and the Amours of My Aunt!, 3 vols (London: John Murray, 1805), II, 161. 19. " ‘The Lion of the Season’, Punch, 25 May 1861, p. 213. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text. 20. " Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. by Patricia Ingham (Ontario: Broadview, 2011 [1853]), p. 294. 21. " R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr. Punch (New York: Penguin, 1993), pp. 172, 184. 22. " Charles Darwin to Asa Gray, 16 April 1866, Darwin Correspondence Project <https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/entry-5057> [accessed 25 January 2016]. 23. " Koditschek, Liberalism, p. 327. 24. " ‘The Missing Link’, Punch, 18 October 1862, p. 165. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text. 25. " L. Perry Curtis Jr, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), pp. xxxi, xi, 16. 26. " John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 2 vols (London: John W. Parker, 1848), I, 375. 27. " Mill, Principles, I, 375. For a discussion of Mill’s use of racial stereotypes see Georgios Varouxakis, Mill on Nationality (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 45–48. 28. " Silvan Schweber, ‘Darwin and the Political Economists: Divergence of Character’, Journal of the History of Biology, 13 (1980), 195–289 (p. 219). See also William Tammone, ‘Competition, the Division of Labor, and Darwin’s Principle of Divergence’, Journal of the History of Biology, 28 (1995), 109–31. 29. " Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1868), II, 224–49. 30. " ‘Monkeyana’, Punch, 18 May 1861, p. 206. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text. 31. " See Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘The Gorilla and the Negro’, Athenaeum, 23 March 1861, pp. 395–96; Richard Owen, ‘On the Characters, Principles of Division, and Primary Groups of the Class Mammalia’, Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnaean Society, 2 (1857), 1–37 (p. 20). 32. " ‘Man and the Apes’, Athenaeum, 13 April 1861, p. 498. 33. " Darwin to Huxley, 22 May 1861, Darwin Correspondence Project <http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/entry-3153> [accessed 17 August 2015]. 34. " Thomas Carlyle, ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’, Fraser’s Magazine, 40 (1849), 670–79. 35. " Paul Du Chaillu, Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (London: John Murray, 1861), p. 421. 36. " Richard Owen, ‘On the Gorilla’, Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, 27 (1859), 1–23 (p. 20). 37. " William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1890), p. 112. 38. " Booth, Darkest England, p. 112. 39. " Adolphe Smith, Street Life in London (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1877), p. 71. 40. " Goodlad, ‘Character’, p. 13. 41. " ‘Where Such Things Are Bought’, Punch, 18 January 1862, p. 27. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text. 42. " ‘Sell’, 2a, in Oxford English Dictionary <www.oed.com> [accessed 7 February 2015]. 43. " Asa Gray, ‘The New Traveller’s Tales’, Athenaeum, 25 May 1861, p. 695. 44. " Asa Gray, ‘The New Traveller’s Tales’ Athenaeum, 18 May 1861, p. 695. 45. " Gray, ‘The New Traveller’s Tales’, p. 662. 46. " See Stuart McCook, ‘“It May Be Truth, but It Is Not Evidence”: Paul du Chaillu and the Legitimation of Evidence in the Field Sciences’, Osiris, 11 (1996), 177–97. 47. " John Plunkett, ‘Celebrity and Community: The Poetics of the Carte-de-visite’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 8 (2003), 55–79 (p. 64). 48. " Plunkett, ‘Celebrity and Community’, p. 71. 49. " William Hazlitt, ‘Why the Arts are not Progressive?’, in The Round Table: A Collection of Essays on Literature, Men, and Manners, 2 vols (Edinburgh: A. Constable and Co., 1817), II, p. 258. 50. " I can find no other usage of this phrase beyond Punch. ‘Nos etiam in Arcadiâ’ also appears in ‘A Royal Christening’, Punch, 11 May 1861, p. 190, as well as in ‘Arcadia’, Punch, 11 February 1871, p. 61. 51. " George Augustus Sala, ‘Arcadia’, Household Words, 7, 18 June 1853, pp. 376–82. 52. " Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, (Cambridge: Belknap, 1999) pp. 546, 405. 53. " Jo Briggs, ‘Gavarni at the Casino: Reflections of Class and Gender in the Visual Culture of 1848’, Victorian Studies, 53 (2011), 639–64 (p. 648). 54. " George Augustus Sala, The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala Written by Himself, 2 vols (London: Cassell and Company, 1895), I, 332. 55. " Sala, Life and Adventures, I, 380–81. 56. " Briggs, ‘Gavarni at the Casino’, p. 649. 57. " Stefan Collini, ‘The Idea of “Character” in Victorian Political Thought’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 35 (1985), 29–50 (p. 31). 58. " ‘Preface’, Punch, p. iv. © 2016 Leeds Trinity University
TI - Liberal Evolutionism and the Satirical Ape
JF - Journal of Victorian Culture
DO - 10.1080/13555502.2016.1152877
DA - 2016-06-01
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