Nineteenth-Century Models of Development: Precocity Before and After Darwin

In this chapter, I first argue that, in The Prelude (1850) and the ‘Immortality Ode’ (1815), Wordsworth uses two fixed points—child and adult—to depict the difference between them—the process of growth—as either progress or degeneration: as (irreversible) movement either up or down a hierarchical scale. Precocity is vilified by Wordsworth because it either pre-empts the progress or epitomises the degeneration which was thought to be enacted by the child’s growth to adulthood. Through a comparative analysis of Darwin’s Origin and a selection of Herbert Spencer’s work, I then demonstrate that the Origin is a pronounced and highly provocative departure from this way of imagining evolution. George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) is an early study of the significance, for the precocious child, of both non-progressive and progressive models of development. Eliot explores an alternative to the early nineteenth-century equation of growth or evolution with progress. Maggie’s childhood is not an embryonic essence of the adult self which is perfected by the end, or beyond the bounds, of the text. It is, rather, is a constituent part of a self which is in process at the end as much as at the beginning.