Essay reviews: Eugenics revisited

Sir Francis Galton, F.R.S. — The Legacy of his Ideas. Proceedings of the twenty-eighth annual symposium of the Galton Institute, 1991. Edited by Milo Keynes. London: Macmillan, 1993. Pp x + 237, £40. ISBN 0-333-54695-4. Victorian Britain will remain for many decades a source of fascination and wonderment for the historically inclined. The world’s richest and most politically stable democracy, Imperial Britain, ruled its huge overseas Empire with relative enlightenment, and very considerable profit, while laissez-faire capitalism surged triumphantly forward at home, bringing in its wake a marvellous infrastructure of railways, roads, urban housing, hospitals, sewerage systems, schools and universities to cater for the expectations of the ever-expanding bourgeoisie. ‘Dark Satanic mills’ transformed the countryside and sustained a huge shift of population from country to town, generating wealth for a society which tolerated child labour, exploitation of women, and appalling poverty and deprivation. It was the era of Victorian morality: hierarchical, retributional and stultifyingly formal, both within and outside the Victorian family. Indeed, many features of twentieth-century life in Britain have, for better or worse, stemmed from a rejection of the moral austerity and oppressive capitalism of that era. Yet the Victorian era manifested much that was wholly admirable. It saw the beginnings of that sense of social duty and egalitarianism which continued to spread widely in Britain right up to the 1960s; it was also an era of intellectual innovation and turmoil, especially in political theory, philosophy and the natural sciences.