In The Expression of the Emotions Darwin describes fear as a primary emotion whose manner of expression has barely changed over millions of years:

Fear is, in the Victorian anthropological sense, a ‘survival’. Like certain primitive tribes, this primitive emotion survives into the modern world unchanged. Like them, it represents the primal conditions of man and allows us to observe those conditions still at work. Moreover, it occupies the same place in the metaphor of development as do ‘primitive’ peoples: fear is an emotion to be controlled, suppressed, outgrown. Reason is cast as an adult emotion, just as western European man is an ‘adult’ on the scale of development. So, like primitive peoples, fear is to be kept under control. Yet like them, it is still there, not fully left behind, nor entirely dominated. In the arc of development, fear is perceived, disturbingly, as at the base. It retains its insurgent power and is liable – like mutiny – to break out.

The effort of empire can be seen in the later-nineteenth-century preoccupation with fear, in a culture which set so much store by courage, or ‘pluck’. It is a preoccupation which then fuels much Edwardian writing, particularly Conrad's works. For example, in Lord Fim the atavistic emotion of fear leads Jim to jump overboard, abandoning ship and passengers.