The introduction defines and historicizes aestheticism and evolutionism, stressing their concurrent emergence in Britain in the 1850s. The introduction then lays out the book’s central claims, provides an accessible review of relevant scholarship on both aestheticism and the history of Victorian science, and situates the project within this broader field. In the course of this overview, the introduction also addresses the problematic Eurocentrism endemic in evolutionary aesthetic conceptions of cultural progress and lays out why the book does not engage directly with questions of race. Finally, the introduction explains the methodology of the project and summarizes its trajectory.

A brief coda situates evolutionary aestheticism within late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century debates about aesthetic pleasure and its capacity to facilitate (or hinder) the establishment of a more just society. First, the coda conducts a partial survey of post-1960s critiques of I. A. Richards’s New Criticism and related approaches – critiques in which “aestheticism” often emerges as a byword for solipsism, obscurity, and political quietism. Shifting to more recent work by the literary scholars Isobel Armstrong and Elaine Scarry, the New Left philosopher Kate Soper, and the New York Times film critic A. O. Scott, among others, the coda finally suggests that we are witnessing a renewed interest in the transformative potential of taste and the concomitant importance of cultural education.

Focusing particularly on the work of painter and critic Roger Fry, critic Clive Bell, novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf, and literary theorist I. A. Richards, the final chapter considers the legacy of evolutionary aestheticism in the first decades of the twentieth century. Although these twentieth-century writers rejected the developmental telos that defined nineteenth-century evolutionary aestheticism, this chapter argues that they inherited many of their predecessors’ ideas about the anti-utilitarian ethics of beauty, the spiritual potency of aesthetic pleasure, and, consequently, the long-term social benefits of good taste. By drawing a through line from mid nineteenth-century evolutionary aesthetics to the aesthetics of the Bloomsbury group and the principles of New Criticism, this chapter also contributes to a body of recent scholarship reassessing conventional narratives about modernism and its purportedly radical break from Victorian concerns and values.

The first chapter traces the notion of “art for art’s sake” to the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, who first engaged with questions of aesthetics in the early 1850s. In their attempts to account for the evolution of the sense of beauty – an adaptation with no obvious survival value – both writers exempted a wide swath of aesthetic activities from the natural laws of scarcity and struggle that governed other areas of biological life. This chapter argues that their evolutionary explanations for beauty (the theories of sexual selection and “play," respectively) thus laid the scientific groundwork for later conceptions of aesthetic experience as escapist, salutary, and therefore beneficial for the species. The chapter concludes with an analysis of selected literary works by Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and George Meredith, whose respective corpuses illustrate the diffuse impact of these ideas on literary evocations of the beautiful.

The third chapter traces the linkages between evolutionary science and aestheticism through the work of popular science writer Grant Allen and the arch aesthete Oscar Wilde, who shared a penchant for socialist politics as well as a firm belief in the truth of both Charles Darwin’s and Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary theories. More importantly, Allen and Wilde were similarly repulsed by the cultural implications of social Darwinism, and for that reason looked to sexual selection – and, by extension, aesthetics – for a life-affirming alternative to the pressures of Darwinian competition. In their fiction and critical prose from the 1880s and 1890s, this chapter argues, both Allen and Wilde eventually arrived at a markedly utopian aesthetics that posited individual self-culture, through the emancipated pursuit of pleasure, as the key to radical social change. This chapter thus sheds light on aestheticism’s late-century polemical turn, which made it a lightning rod in the sexual controversies of the fin de siècle.

The second chapter places Walter Pater, the widely acknowledged founder of British aestheticism, in conversation with mathematician and philosopher W. K. Clifford in order to illuminate the overlapping development of aestheticism and evolutionism in the 1860s and 1870s. Around the same time that Pater made the case for “art for art’s sake,” Clifford laid out a sweeping secular humanism that reaffirmed an anthropocentric and pseudo-religious view of the cosmos. Clifford’s optimistic reinterpretation of evolutionary science, this chapter argues, reinforced and drew on Pater’s contemporary conception of the aesthetic temperament: a discriminating, tasteful personality capable of transforming, in Pater’s words, the “ghastly spectacle of the endless material universe” into the “delightful consciousness of an ever-widening kinship and sympathy.” The chapter concludes with an analysis of the work of Mathilde Blind, who synthesized Clifford’s and Pater’s ideas in a poetic oeuvre that sought to inculcate readers into reverent ways of experiencing an otherwise atheistic world.

The fourth chapter challenges our tendency to conflate fin-de-siècle aestheticism with a pessimistic Decadence by exploring the “life-enhancing” aesthetics of Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and her younger colleague, the American connoisseur Bernard Berenson. Steeped in Walter Pater’s aesthetic philosophy and Herbert Spencer’s progressive evolutionism, both Lee and Berenson attempted to balance their passion for Renaissance art with their equally strong commitments to scientific rationalism and (especially in Lee’s case) social amelioration. Looking at Lee’s extensive corpus of critical prose, travel writing, and fiction as well as Berenson’s early Renaissance studies, this chapter argues that their intersecting investigations into the nature of beauty culminated in Lee’s influential “psychological aesthetics”: a cross-disciplinary theory that insisted on the evolutionary value of positive aesthetic experience and thus elevated the stakes of public taste.

Inspired by recent work on global decadence as well as Susan Sontag’s classic formulation of dandyism, this chapter focuses on the figure of the dandy as he appears in fiction and nonfiction writing from and about the Hawaiian islands. In the hands of Anglo-American travel writers such as Charles Warren Stoddard and Robert Louis Stevenson, the island dandy often embodies an alluring but dangerous decadence associated in particular with late nineteenth-century Polynesia; for Indigenous writers and practitioners, by contrast, the dandy’s subversive, nonnormative masculinity becomes a way of leveraging European style against encroaching colonial power. This chapter argues that the island dandy thus emblematizes the manifold anxieties surrounding cultural and political modernity that would emerge in the 1890s and give the decade its characteristic sense of jubilant expectation and pessimistic dread. Within the broader context of the volume, the chapter also considers what approaches and methods might better serve the field of Victorian studies as it reorients itself along increasingly global lines.