Evolutionary Aestheticism in Victorian Culture

Although the hard-nosed scientist and the dandy aesthete seem unlikely allies at first glance, Lindsay Wilhelm argues that Victorian evolutionism and the Aesthetic (or “art for art's sake”) Movement converged on surprisingly utopian ideas about beauty, pleasure, and the power of good taste to shape our society for the better.

The Aesthetic Movement, a collection of artists, writers and thinkers who rejected traditional ideas of beauty as guided and judged by morals and utility and rallied under the banner of ''art for art''s sake'', are often associated with hedonism and purposelessness. However, as Lindsay Wilhelm shows, aestheticism may have been more closely related to nineteenth-century ideas of progress and scientific advancement than we think. This book illuminates an important intellectual alliance between aestheticism and evolutionism in late-nineteenth-century Britain, putting aesthetic writers such as Vernon Lee, Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater into dialogue with scientific thinkers such as Darwin and mathematician W. K. Clifford. Considering in particular how Aestheticism and scientific thinking converged on utopian ideas about beauty, Lindsay Wilhelm reveals how this evolutionary aestheticism crucially shaped Victorian debates about individual pleasure and social progress that continue to resonate today.