We Are All Monsters: How Deviant Organisms Came to Define Us

In this clever study, Mangham (The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy), a Victorian literature professor at the University of Reading, explores how science and literature changed understandings of human difference during the 19th century. He contends that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, and Lucas Malet’s The History of Sir Richard Calmady promoted the growing consensus that “monsters” (those once viewed as having been “born with at least one permanent physiological defect”) reflect the natural processes of evolution. The author chronicles the development of scientific opinion over the course of the 19th century, including pre-Darwinian ideas about the capacity of species to change over time. Shelley, Dickens, and Malet, Mangham argues, contributed to the understanding of “monstrosity” as the product of natural mutations through their depictions of “abnormal” characters and their formal inventiveness, which signaled that the novel was subject to endless permutations in a manner analogous to human difference. There’s as much science on offer as there is literary criticism, and Mangham proves he’s more than up to the challenge of teasing out the surprising overlap between the disciplines, even if he overreaches in his claim that fiction “cocreated” changes in the scientific understanding of human difference. The result is a fascinating marriage of scientific history and literary analysis. (Feb.)