Toward the end of this study, Gowan Dawson cites the famous, possibly apocryphal, encounter between Thomas Henry Huxley and Oscar Wilde; Huxley is reported to have said of Wilde, after a visit by Wilde to Huxley's home in the mid-1880s, “that man never enters my home again.” Dawson sees this episode as a synecdoche for the defenders of Darwinism's “distinctive and long-standing strategy to dissociate Darwinian science from the taint of aestheticism” (199). Because of the “politics of evolution,” as Adrian Desmond has termed the debates of the nineteenth century, Darwin, Huxley, Joseph Hooker, and others were continually trying to protect evolutionary theory from attack by those—such as St. George Mivart—who saw evolution's emphasis on materialism leading to dangerous political and social practices such as sexual immorality, birth control, and divorce (Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London [Chicago and London, 1989]). In highlighting this particular feature of the evolutionary debates of the latter half of the nineteenth century, Dawson seeks to correct overly sanguine accounts of nineteenth-century encounters between literature and science. Dawson points out that “those seeking to discredit the cultural authority of evolutionary science identified it with the alleged sensual indulgence of aestheticism, while those attempting to establish it as a respectable secular theodicy denied such a connection and instead emphasized links with more reputable literary writers” (7).

The second chapter, which illuminates Darwin's attempts to protect The Descent of Man from imputations of obscenity and materialism, ends by shedding light on one of the more contentious episodes of the evolution debates. Mivart had imputed, in an anonymous review, that Darwin's son George had recommended prostitution as a check to population growth. The subsequent war between the Darwinians and Mivart, and Mivart's subsequent banishment from scientific circles, can be better understood once we realize that Charles Darwin was doing more than protecting his son. The potential associations of the Descent's emphasis on sexual selection with certain forms of bestial pornography, and the sensualism of Algernon Swinburne's poetry, lead us to see Darwin as earnestly trying to protect his theories from the kind of Victorian disrepute that might lead many to reject it out of hand.

Dawson then turns his attention to John Tyndall, who in 1874 delivered the presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Belfast. Tyndall's pronounced materialism in that address attracted the ire of the Belfast clergy, and Dawson seeks to direct our attention to a particular feature of that materialism. Tyndall had sought to make “an explicit connection … between the conclusions of modern science and the atomism advanced by ancient authorities such as the Greek philosopher Epicurus and the Roman poet of Lucretius” (83). That association opened up Tyndall and other materialists to accusations of attempting to bring back pagan idolatry and sensuousness. St. Paul's warning in the first letter to the Corinthians that those who did not believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ would “inevitably revert to the licentious pagan maxim: ‘let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die’” was repeatedly associated with Epicureanism, Tyndall's address, and materialism in general (95). Eventually, similar charges were leveled at Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance, published in 1873. Science, said Frederick William Farrar, then University Preacher at Cambridge, made possible Pater's celebration of Renaissance skepticism, materialism, and sensuality. In response, Tyndall and his supporters tried to realign Tyndall's thought with the novels of George Eliot, the poetry of Alfred Tennyson, and the “sublime grandeur of the naturalistic, although still spiritually and morally uplifting, universe” of Thomas Carlyle's “Natural Supernaturalism” (103).

These spurious associations between wanton pagan sensuality and materialism opened up the possibility for further attacks from those seeking to associate evolutionary thought with licentiousness. The Obscene Publications Act, passed in 1857, in combination with the first legal definition of obscenity in 1868, led to an increased scrutiny of evolutionary books for encouraging sexual experimentation. In April 1877 these elements came together when Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant courted prosecution by reprinting a forty-five-year-old book on reproductive physiology entitled The Fruits of Physiology. The reprint's sixpence price was apparently much of the issue; Bradlaugh and Besant claimed that the pamphlet contained the same information as many medical texts, which were prohibitively priced out of the budget of lower classes. Could the book—Victorians worried—be used as a guide to reproductive control? Could the book, and other more expensive books like it, such as Dr. W. B. Carpenter's Principles of Human Physiology, incite masturbation? Bradlaugh and Bessant's attempts to point out the hypocrisy of the class-bound scientific and medical establishment, and Darwin's attempts to reject being associated with this kind of libertinism, make for an interesting chapter.

Dawson then directs our attention to the case of William Kingdon Clifford—Cambridge mathematician, noted atheist, and sexual free thinker—who had died at age thirty-three, and the struggle over his posthumous reputation. In his letters, Clifford had admired the poetry of Swinburne, advocated a much more relaxed divorce code, and repeatedly attacked the Christian faith. Critics of Clifford's atheism and materialism used these details to cast doubt on his work. The chapter then turns its attention to the work of Clifford's widow, Lucy Clifford, as well as Huxley, to control the publication of Clifford's early essays and letters, in an attempt to protect his intellectual reputation.

The final chapter details struggles over evolution's offshoot, degeneration. Degeneration, Dawson notes, was never a rigidly defined body of thought, and its open-ended nature allowed both scientific materialists and their critics to deploy it strategically. The Catholic critic William Samuel Lilly made the move of equivocating the moral depravity and degeneration of aestheticism with the “growing dominance of the empirical and unspiritual doctrines advanced by modern science” (199). Just as vociferously, Huxley, Henry Maudsley, and Max Nordau attempted to use degeneration to diagnose aesthete output as degenerate and dangerous, and thus disassociate it from associations with scientific materialism.

Dawson's study makes a serious contribution to our understanding of the evolutionary debates of the late nineteenth century. That noted, while the book uses a truly interdisciplinary approach, those expecting new readings of the literary texts cited will be disappointed; the book's critical intervention is largely in the arena of the history of science. The book does an admirable job of showing how scientific figures strategically employed and repelled the reputations of various classical and contemporary literary figures but shines little light on how literary writers might have participated in the politics of evolution themselves. That limitation, however, does not diminish the book's elegant contribution but invites us to hope for further illumination from Dawson and other scholars of science and literature.