Between the apes and the angels: Images of the caveman in Victorian and early modern literature

This study focuses on fiction's role in explaining the new Creation story suggested by Darwin's On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man and articulated by the combined efforts of scientists from many disciplines. I will demonstrate that the fictional treatments of the caveman in the works of H. G. Wells, Andrew Lang, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack London, and Bernard Shaw sought to spread the new theories of prehistory and, further, to transmute hard scientific "fact" into workable metaphors to reconfigure, if not replace, the Judeo-Christian explanation of humanity's Genesis that was shaken by those disturbing hominid fossils unearthed in the mid-19th Century. The introduction begins the discussion of the complementary roles played by scientific literature and scientific fiction in the effort to weave a new paradigm for humanity's origin that would account for those fossils. Each succeeding chapter examines in detail how one prominent writer of fiction creates his own version of the new paradigm in order to explain, defend, or reinterpret the new scientific explanation for humanity's origin and essential nature. The aim is to compare how the different speculations about prehistoric humanity contribute to a continually evolving definition of "human" and to show how different interpretations of human origins shape both our understanding of contemporary humanity and our predictions about humanity's future. The concluding chapter discusses some contemporary works to show how the image of the caveman continues to evolve in the 20th Century.