of The Unclassed, recapitulates Gissing's own development from political radicalism through disillusionment to an increasingly bitter denunciation of universal vulgarity. Social commentary, in these novels, ebbs and flows according to the state of the author's investment in elite culture. Furthermore, «French» methods had always to contend with «English» moralism, with an inherited faith in the power of imaginative sympathy. The conclusion of The Nether World-a man and woman resolving to bring what comfort they can to those less resourceful than themselves- echoes the conclusions of Dickens's
In the early 1880s George Moore, the eldest son of a wealthy Liberal M.P. and stable owner, having failed to establish himself as an artist in Paris, took up naturalism. His first novel, A Modern Lover (1883), the story of a young artist, was, according to the Spectator, a frank homage to 'Zola and his odious school.' The initial situation of A Mummer's Wife (1885) reproduces, with equal frankness, the initial situation of Zola's Thérèse Raquin (1867), which Moore had thought of translating: sickly husband, neurotic wife, interfering mother-in-law, assertive lover, all penned in desolate rooms above a shop. Kate Ede elopes with an actor, Dick Lennox, and achieves some success on the stage. Now divorced and pregnant, she marries Lennox. But she has taken to drink, and her baby dies. Moore places her exactly on the curve of the degeneration plot. 'She had met Dick in her seven- and-twentieth year, when the sap of her slowly-developing nature was rising to its highest point.' After the climax of elopement, the taste of freedom, it's downhill all the way. The dissolute life of the traveling players wears her out. Abandoned by Lennox, she declines into alcoholism and prostitution, eventually dying a loathsome death. A Mummer's Wife is the nearest thing to French naturalism in English literature. It was duly banned by the circulating libraries.
In March 1887, Beatrice Potter shared a railway carriage with the historian and Liberal M.P. Sir George Trevelyan. 'I begged him to go into a smoking carriage… for had I not in the pocket of my sealskin not only a volume of Zola, but my case of cigarettes! neither of which could I enjoy in his distinguished presence.' The novel was Au bonheur des dames, in which Zola «did» department stores. Sir George eventually settled down with The Princess Casamassima (1887), James's stab at an unpoetic subject matter. Potter, who became, in partnership with Sidney Webb, the leading sociologist of her day, remained enthusiastic about Zola-as, indeed, did several writers with more consistently polemical intentions than Gissing or Moore.
Potter's cousin, Margaret Harkness (as John Law) published Zolaesque novels- A City Girl (1887), Out of Work (1888), In Darkest London (1889), A Manchester Shirtmaker (1890) — that earned the respect of Friedrich Engels. The influence of Germinal on mining novels like W. E. Tirebuck's Miss Grace of All Souls' (1895) or Joseph Keating's Son Judith (1900) is evident enough. But working-class, or -613- socialist, fiction never achieved the same prominence as two other genres shaped by polemical intent: slum fiction and New Woman fiction.
Slum fiction, pioneered in the 1880s by Gissing and Walter Besant, and developed in the 1890s by Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Morrison, Somerset Maugham and others, incorporated the decline plot wholesale but shifted the emphasis from heredity to environment. A number of stories- Gissing's Demos, Kipling's 'The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot' (1890), Morrison's «Lizerunt» (1894), Maugham's Liza of Lambeth (1897) — concern women whose lives follow a similar pattern: courtship, and a glimpse of freedom, then marriage, marital violence, abandonment, and finally prostitution or death. These heroines are not degenerate. They are spirited women who have the vitality beaten out of them by an inhospitable environment and a series of brutal men. The contrast between female virtue and institutionalized violence allows for «English» pathos as well as «French» realism.
However, the remorseless downward spiral of the plot still carries the message that there is no escape, no possibility of transformation. In Morrison's Child of the Jago (1896), heredity combines with environment to corrupt the young hero. Morrison wanted to distinguish between a degenerate working class and one that is organically sound but damaged by its environment. The novel's reforming priest, Father Sturt, is based on the same Reverend Jay who had lifted a passage from The Nether World; Morrison later endorsed Jay's plan to establish penal settlements in isolated parts of the country where working-class degenerates could be confined for life and prevented from reproducing their 'type.'
Heredity was also a crucial concern in the New Woman novels that began to appear toward the end of the 1880s. Julia Frankau (writing as Frank Danby) out- Zolaed Zola in A Babe in Bohemia (1889). Lucilla Lewesham, a young girl brought up by her decadent father and his shrieking mistress, escapes moral contamination but not hereditary epilepsy. The book was savagely denounced in the press, and banned by the circulating libraries. Degeneration theory served Frankau's sensationalism admirably. Meeting her in 1911, Arnold Bennett found her 'very chic'-and thoroughly ashamed of her novels. But even those New Woman novelists who had no reason to feel ashamed of their novels-George Egerton (i.e., Mary Chavelita Dunne), Emma Frances Brooke, Mona Caird, Ménie Muriel Dowie-had much to say about (male) degeneracy. -614-
'Doctors-spiritual must face the horrors of the dissecting-room,' Sarah Grand declared in the preface to Ideala (1888). Her heroine decides that the future of the race is a question of morality and health. 'Perhaps I should… say a question of health and morality, since the latter is so dependent on the former.' Both heroine and author deploy the biomedical categories of late nineteenth-century social psychology. Ideala believes that the British Empire, like the Roman, has decayed internally, and that the solution is not reform, but a program of physical and moral regeneration.
Grand's third novel, The Heavenly Twins (1894), was hugely successful and established her as one of the leading writers of the day. It has been claimed as a precursor of modernism, and does experiment with tone and point of view. But the experiments are largely confined to one of its three loosely connected case studies, the story of the 'heavenly twins' Angelica and Diavolo. The other case studies can best be understood as versions of the naturalist degeneration plot. Edith Beale marries Sir Mosley Menteith, a syphilitic degenerate, gives birth to a child famously likened to a 'speckled toad,' and dies. The deformed child was a popular motif in naturalist fiction, incarnating degeneracy. Evadne Frayling marries one of Menteith's fellow officers. More worldly-wise than Edith, she recognizes his unsuitability at once, and declines to consummate the marriage. She remains unfulfilled, and cannot find a way to redeem her husband, whose habits are 'the outcome of his nature.'
Book 6 of The Heavenly Twins is narrated by Doctor Galbraith, a specialist in nervous disorders who examines and befriends Evadne. If Edith's story is a case study in degeneracy, Evadne's is a case study in that other modern disease, 'hysteria.' After her husband's death, Galbraith marries Evadne. But the outcome of his efforts to restore her to health remains uncertain. Paying a call in the neighborhood, Evadne encounters the 'speckled toad' once again, and suffers a relapse. Degeneracy and hysteria may yet have the last word.
As, indeed, they threaten to do in the conservative polemic of contemporary popular fiction. Stevenson's Mr. Hyde gives 'an impression of deformity without any namable malformation.' In his concluding statment of the case, Dr. Jekyll speaks of the 'bestial avidity' with which his monstrous double would relish the infliction of torture. Professor Moriarty, in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, has 'hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind,' a criminal «strain» in the blood. -615-
According to Van Helsing, in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), the Count himself is a degenerate. 'Lombroso and Nordau would so classify him.' Dracula's invasion of England dramatizes anxieties that were the stock in trade of theorists like Nordau and Cesare Lombroso. He aims to pollute the entire English race, beginning with his natural allies, the parasites, outcasts, and madmen. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein had produced a monster by perverting Science and violating Nature; these finde-siècle monsters are the product of Nature, and can only be mastered by a combination of Science, faith, and bourgeois shrewdness.
Vizatelly's imprisonment seems to have taken the sting out of the moral objections to Zola. Thereafter, open hostility receded. In 1893, Zola was invited to London by the Institute of Journalists, and, much to Gissing's amusement, received by the Lord Mayor. Gissing noted that no prominent author had played any part in the welcome and that a testimonial dinner arranged by the Authors' Club was 'in the hands of a lot of new and young men.'
The young writer most likely to further the cause of naturalism in England was Hubert Crackanthorpe, who the year before had conducted a long and respectful interview with Zola, which he published in his experimental magazine, the Albermarle. He certainly made full use of the decline plot. In 'A Conflict of Egoisms,' in Wreckage (1893), degeneracy destroys a New Woman, the neglected wife of a novelist suffering from 'brain exhaustion.' Professionally mature but emotionally immature, she cannot cope with her husband's indifference, and retaliates by destroying the manuscript of his latest novel. He decides on suicide, but exhaustion gets him first; he drops dead as he is about to leap off a bridge. Crackanthorpe seems to have taken his own narratives a little too seriously. He
