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Article: Meditating on the low: a Darwinian reading of 'Great Expectations.'.
- Article from:
- Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
- Article date:
- September 22, 1998
- Author:
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There have been surprisingly few Darwinian readings of the novels that Charles Dickens wrote after 1859, the year in which Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species.(1) But while Dickens's last three novels - the ones best suited chronologically to support such a reading - have, for the most part, not been interpreted in the light of evolutionary theory, Dickens's relationship to contemporary scientific knowledge and to Darwinism in particular has not been similarly neglected. Influential books by Gillian Beer and George Levine have traced important links between Dickens and the scientific theories of his time.(2)
However, the extent to which scientific ...