QUESTIONS OF CRIME

The following chapter surveys certain key conceptions of degeneration and atavism in Victorian and Edwardian social debate. The problem of periodisation is particularly difficult here. There is no real sense of a ‘founding text’ of degeneration or atavism in England, like Morel's Treatise (1857) or Lombroso's Criminal Man (1876); it is more difficult to coordinate the precise moments of a theorisation of degeneration which runs alongside, but also within, the terms of Darwinian evolution and its more obvious publication ‘landmarks’ – 1859 and 1871. In England, moreover, social theory itself was continually challenged not simply at the level of its content but its very right to existence. When Mill was advising the Saint-Simonian school on how to publicise their work this side of the Channel, he made the famous observation that to produce any effect in England it was necessary ‘carefully to conceal the fact of your having any system or body of opinions, to instruct them on isolated points and to endeavour to form their habits of thought by your mode of treating simple and practical questions’. English commentators could be notoriously complacent and insular in their perception of society, perhaps most especially in the 1850s and 1860s, apparently quite happy with piecemeal reforms and ‘advances’.