Eugenics, the idea of conscious intervention to bring about perceived biological improvement in humans, was first named in Britain in 1883. Here, it was a class-based biologistic discourse aimed at altering the demographic balance of society in favour of the middle class. It developed in the second half of the nineteenth century in response to poverty and fears of urban degeneration and a perceived weakening of imperial power, and in opposition to charity towards those sections of the poor that were considered undeserving. In this national context, it found its most powerful expression not in legislation and public policy but in popular and intellectual discourses and fiction.

The term eugenics was coined by Francis Galton in 1883. Galton had published his first article on the subject, “Hereditary Talent and Character” nearly two decades earlier, in Macmillan's Magazine (1865), advocating tests for selecting the most able men and women to be parents, arguing that race improvement was no more than a rational working with nature. In 1869, he published Hereditary Genius and in 1874 he popularized the phrase “nature and nurture” with the publication of English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture. In the 1880s, he ran an Anthropometric Laboratory in South Kensington Museum for measuring the public. He would later define eugenics as “the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally” (1908). While Galton claimed to have been inspired by his older cousin, Charles Darwin, Darwin in fact rejected Galton’s eugenic ideas, declaring in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) that they would lead to the loss of what was most noble about human nature, and challenging Galton’s eugenic plans.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the brutalizing effects of city slums were becoming clear and the housing question came to the forefront of public debate. Anxieties over national efficiency and the idea that poverty might be solved by experts coincided with an emergent, gendered, and moral citizenship, as middle-class women sought to gain public recognition for their national contribution as mothers. The living conditions of the London poor were documented in regular columns in the Daily News, explored by novelists such as Arthur Morrison and Jack London. Galton saw fiction as an important vehicle for eugenics, writing two eugenic utopias, “Donoghue of Dunno Weir” (1901) and ‘The Eugenic College of Kantsaywhere’ (1910). Hardly any late Victorian novel did not have something to say about reproduction, and writers including Sarah Grand, H.G. Wells, and Grant Allen lent support to eugenic ideas, though Wells was ambivalent over questions of heredity, arguing for minimum standards of housing and education in Mankind in the Making (1903) and unequivocally rejecting eugenics in 1940. While eugenics appealed to certain members of the left, it really only found support among a particular group of middle-class socialists, most conspicuously the Fabians who were uninterested in trade unions, opposed to the formation of an independent labour party, and were stridently imperialist. Eugenics would also be taken up by modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot, but ultimately fiction proved too engaged with ideas of development and complexity to submit to the austere notions of eugenics.

The Eugenics Education Society was established in 1907, with close links with the Committee of the Moral Education League (founded in 1898). It saw class as a matter of heredity, and poverty as the result of inherited defect; it held that the poor were insufficiently responsible to control their own fertility. Galton’s protégé and biographer Karl Pearson was Appointed the first Galton Professor of Eugenics at University College London in 1911.

Prominent members included Mary Scharlieb, Sybil Katherine Neville-Rolfe, and Arnold White. James Crichton-Browne was the Society’s first president, followed in 1909 by Montague Hughes Crackanthorpe, with Galton as honorary President. Links were established with France, Germany, Italy, and the USA and, in 1912, the society organized the first International Eugenics Congress, held in South Kensington under the auspices of London University. In 1912, a proposed eugenic amendment to the Mental Deficiency Bill sought to prohibit marriage and criminalize procreation among the perceived ‘feebleminded’. This was the closest Britain came to passing a eugenic act. The Liberal (later Labour) MP Josiah Wedgwood succeeded in securing the removal of this clause before the bill passed into law in 1913. Nonetheless, eugenics continued to attract support in Britain during the interwar years, with membership of the Eugenics Society peaking during the 1930s. As the emphasis shifted from positive to negative eugenics, the elimination of the supposedly unfit, eugenics moved out of British popular discourse and into European fascist biopolitics and American and European legislation.

The interwar years saw the development in Britain of what has become known as reform eugenics, under the leadership of Carlos P. Blacker, president of the Eugenics Society from 1931 to 1952. Reform eugenics conceded a great role to the environment and saw a move from class-based assumptions. In Birth Control and the State (1926), Blacker argued that biological explanations needed to be considered in a broader social context. The Eugenics Society introduced into parliament two bills (1931 and 1932) to legalize voluntary sterilization, but these attracted little support. In 1934 the British government set up a Committee on Mental Degeneracy headed by Laurence G. Brock. While Brock emphasized the uncertainty surrounding the biological cause of mental deficiency, his committee report fanned a new interest in voluntary sterilization in the case of hereditary disorders which won the endorsement of Julian Huxley and Lancelot Hogben, holder of the new Chair of Social Biology at the London School of Economics, and several Labour groups and women’s organizations.

Eugenics was severely discredited by the atrocities of the Third Reich, and the class bias which had been accentuated in its expression in Britain also became both transparent and unacceptable in the new, more egalitarian climate that followed the Second World War. But eugenic ideas and hereditarian theories of intelligence continued, underpinning the inception of IQ tests in the early decades of the century, and shaping approaches to social inequality. Support for biological determinism continues to fluctuate, inflected by economic, political, and social conditions, and eugenic ideas can still be traced in attitudes to disability and disadvantage.

-Angelique Richardson

• Gould, S. J. (1996). The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton & Company

• Hanson, C. (2013). Eugenics, Literature and Culture in Post-War Britain. New York and Abingdon: Routledge.

• Kevles, D. (1995). In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

• Mazumdar, P. (1992). Eugenics, Human Genetics and Human Failings: The Eugenics Society, its Sources and Critics in Britain. London: Routledge.

• Richardson, Angelique (2008). Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman. Oxford: Oxford University Press.