Thomas Hardy and Biology: Character, Culture and Environment, 1859-1928. (360G-Wellcome-096507_Z_11_Z)

Hardy was deeply interested in Victorian scientific and medical questions, listing among the thinkers who had most influenced him Charles Darwin, T.H.Huxley and Herbert Spencer, and taking notes from Darwin, Galton, Eduard von Hartmann, Huxley, George Henry Lewes, Maudsley, George Romanes, Spencer and August Weismann. Examining his notebooks, correspondence, fiction and poetry, I will also consider his meetings and correspondence with physicians, psychiatrists, eugenists and degenerationists ( including Crichton-Browne and C.W. Saleeby), as well as his critical reception, including the interest in his work by, for example, the sexologist Havelock Ellis. The first key goal of the research is to demonstrate the extent to which Hardy explored in his fiction the ideas which contemporary scientists were researching and debating, on the physical basis of mind, the relation of psychology and physiology, the unconscious, the physiological basis of the emotions, psychological differences be tween humans and animals, the role of instincts in the development of the moral sense, and evolutionary and medical ideas about war. The second key goal is to shed new light on Hardy's novels. The third key goal is to ask what antecedents there are in Hardy's fiction for postgenomic science and medicine.