Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / The end of the nineteenth century witnessed a Gothic literary revival, which included the publication of Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla ( 1872), Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ( 1886), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) within a twenty-five year period. The dissertation interprets such late nineteenth-century Gothic texts in light of the rise of Victorian anthropology and an anthropological paradigm based on Darwinian evolutionary theory. Before the 1860s, the study of human beings had been dominated by the discipline of ethnology; however, the ethnological paradigm, based on a Biblical understanding of human history, began to fracture with the discovery of prehistoric human remains at Brixham Cave (1858) and the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). Those events brought the Biblical framework into question and created a sense of cultural trauma reflected in both scientific and popular debates on the origins of humanity. The anthropological paradigm, articulated in the writings of anthropologists such as Sir John Lubbock, Edward Burnett Tylor, and James Ferguson McLennan, managed the traumatic implications of Darwinian evolutionary theory by creating a hierarchical ladder of biological and cultural evolution that affirmed the primacy of human over animal, and civilized over savage. It also, by implication, supported the colonial enterprise by placing the European at the top of that ladder. Late nineteenth-century Gothic fiction posed a fundamental challenge to the optimistic progressionism of the anthropological paradigm and the hierarchical oppositions on which it was based by implying that Englishmen and women were not as different from the animal or savage as they believed, and that evolution itself was not always upward. By doing so, it re-traumatized what the anthropological paradigm attempted to contain, and pointed toward a more diverse and egalitarian definition of the human. The Gothic has often been seen as a conservative genre: the dissertation argues that understanding the ways in which late nineteenth-century Gothic fiction challenged the anthropological paradigm can reveal its disruptive, iconoclastic potential.

This doctoral thesis examines the role of animals in nineteenth-century science and Victorian Gothic fiction of the latter half of the century. It is interdisciplinary in its exploration of the interrelationship between science writings and literary prose and it seeks to place the Gothic animal body in its cultural and historical setting. This study is interested in the ways in which Gothic literature tests the limits of the human by using scientific ideas about disease, evolution, species confusion, and disability. In analysing the animal trope in Gothic scientific fiction, this thesis conceptualises the ways in which the Gothic mode functions in relation to, while setting itself apart from, contemporary scientific theories about humankind‘s place in the natural world. Chapter 1, 'Man‘s Best Fiend: Evolution, Rabies, and the Gothic Dog‘, focuses on the dog as an animal whose ability to carry and communicate deadly diseases to humans exemplified the breakdown of the animal-human boundary. I read late-nineteenth-century vampire and werewolf narratives as literary manifestations of social hysteria associated with dogs and rabies. In Chapter 2, 'Shaping Evolution: Amphibious Gothic in Edward Bulwer-Lytton‘s The Coming Race and William Hope Hodgson‘s The Boats of the “Glen Carrig”, I examine the role of the frog in Victorian science as the background to Gothic fiction‘s portrayal of the Gothic body as an amphibious being. The next chapter explores the spider‘s function in Victorian natural history as the background to its role as a protean and unstable Gothic trope in fiction. Chapter four, 'Geological Underworlds: Mythologizing the Beast in Victorian Palaeontology‘, looks at ways in which the dinosaur in science influenced the literary imaginations of Gothic writers Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen, and Bram Stoker. Under the title "Monsters Manufactured!": Humanised Animals, Freak Culture, and the Victorian Gothic‘, the final chapter concludes the study with a discussion of freak culture, making key links between unusually-shaped people in society and human/animal hybrids in the Gothic fiction of H. G. Wells, Richard Marsh, and Wilkie Collins.

Ethnographic collections in western museums such as the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) carry many meanings, but by definition, they represent an intercultural encounter. This history of this encounter is often lost, overlooked, or obscured, and yet it has bearing on how the objects in the collection have been interpreted and understood. This thesis uncovers the hidden history of one particular collection in the RAMM and examines the multiple meanings that have been attributed to the objects in the collection over time. The Richard Dennett Collection was made in Africa in the years when European powers began to colonise the Congo basin. Richard Edward Dennett (1857-1921) worked as a trader in the Lower Congo between 1879 and 1902. The collection was accessioned by the RAMM in 1889. The research contextualises the collection by making a close analysis of primary source material which was produced by the collector and by his contemporaries, and includes publications, correspondence, photographs and illustrations which have been studied in museums and archives in Europe and North America. Dennett was personally involved with key events in the colonial history of this part of Africa but he also studied the indigenous BaKongo community, recording his observations about their political and material culture. As a result he became involved in the institutions of anthropology and folklore in Britain which were attempting to explain, classify and interpret such cultures. Through examining Dennett’s history this research has been able to explore the Congo context, the indigenous society, and those European institutions which collected and interpreted BaKongo collections. The research has added considerably to the museum’s knowledge about this collection and its collector, and the study responds to the practical imperative implicit in a Collaborative Doctoral Project, by proposing a small temporary exhibition in the RAMM to explore these histories and meanings. In making this proposal the research considers the current curatorial debate concerning responsible approaches to colonial collections, and assesses some of the strategies that are being employed in museums today.