The Evolutionary Epic and the Cosmic Meaning of History in Victorian Britain

This paper examines the evolutionary epic, a genre of science writing that originated in the Victorian period as a synthesis of universal history and the science of evolution in order to construct a grand narrative of life. The paper focuses particularly on how authors of the evolutionary epic sought to integrate the different temporal registers that informed the genre, namely the human, the geological, and the cosmic. Initially, a progressive evolutionism proposed in the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) provided the unifying framework for the genre. However, in the second half of the century, the science of thermodynamics problematized the teleological narrative of the evolutionary epic. As the law of entropy posited a general winding down of the universe, authors of the evolutionary epic had to come to terms with the possibility that evolutionary history may ultimately come to an abrupt end with heat death. While some authors, such as Alfred Russel Wallace, believed that humanity represented a transcendent force that would continue to evolve in the world beyond (e.g. the future life), others, such as Edwin Lankester, hoped that by constructing the story of all life, humans would be enabled to take charge of their evolutionary future and somehow overcome the constraints of nature. Thus authors of the evolutionary epic sought to imbue history with a grand cosmic meaning that would either buttress or replace existing religious cosmologies.