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Darwin’s extensive reading of literature was a crucial starting point for Gillian Beer’s insights into the interchange between science and culture which have shaped scholarship in the field for the last three decades. However, while the impact of Darwin’s reading on the imaginative development of his theories has continued to be an extremely productive area of study, there has been hardly any consideration of the broader context of nineteenth-century scientists’ reading practices in relation to literature, giving the impression that Darwin’s thought was especially, perhaps uniquely, amenable to the impact of his immersion in fiction and poetry. This paper examines the extensive but relatively little-known literary reading of the comparative anatomist Richard Owen, suggesting that important aspects of other, and even explicitly non-Darwinian, areas of Victorian science were just as likely to be influenced by their practitioners’ enthusiasm for fiction and poetry. That Darwin and Owen frequently read the same literary works, and often in the same or similar locations (whether in metropolitan clubs or out in the field), also permits direct comparisons of their reading practices, which, intriguingly, suggest that, far from being uniquely amenable to it, Darwin’s scientific thought might in fact have been shaped much less by his literary reading than that of contemporaneous naturalists like Owen. In particular, the paper focuses on Owen’s reading of serial fiction, and considers the close parallels between his practices of reading serial novels and his use of comparative anatomy in his renowned reconstructions of the skeletons of prehistoric creatures.

This essay reads Our Mutual Friend as Dickens’s rejoinder to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, and sees it as a novel that is profoundly shaped by the imaginative impact of Darwin’s work. However, the direct influence of On the Origin of Species is not the essay’s major concern. Instead, the essay sees this novel as a response to some of the questions posed by Darwin’s work about how a natural world driven by chance and contigency, death, waste and hunger might be redeemed. I focus on the figure of Mr Venus, the taxidermist who, I argue, is an affectionate portrait of Dickens’s friend Richard Owen. By tracing Owen’s involvement in debates over evolution and the origins of life, I show that these contemporary debates had a considerable backwash in a novel saturated with the metaphors of evolution, and centrally concerned with the nature of, and the relationship betweeen, life and death. I suggest that Mr Venus’s shop is a comic version of the Hunterian Museum, over which Owen presided, and that its portrayal encapuslates the novel’s concerns with evolution, life and death. I argue that Dickens’s response to the challenge of Darwinism is to see love as the world’s redemption, and that he uses transmuted versions of Mr Venus’s shop as a vivid metaphor for the idea that love is the redeeming spark of life. I suggest, though, that in the post-Darwinian imaginative landscape, love could not redeem all, and that Dickens’s redeeming vision of love is finally inadequate to save all his characters. ‘What the alligator knew, ages deep in the slime’ was that love was powerless against nature -and what it didn’t know, and Dickens tried to show in this, his last completed novel, is that in spite of the ruthless rapacity of both nature and human society, love makes the world go round.

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‘Homology’ or the logic of ‘sameness’ will be examined in non‐Darwinian and Darwinian perspectives. It is argued that Darwinian ‘homology’ is both imprisoned in a non‐explanatory logic, and that the line from Owen’s pre‐Darwinian definition to complexity theory’s concept of weak signals and ‘attractors’ better serves the need of organizational studies to establish a concept of ‘sameness’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]