We Are All Monsters

How the monsters of nineteenth-century literature and science came to define us.

“Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?” In We Are All Monsters, Andrew Mangham offers a fresh interpretation of this question uttered by Frankenstein’s creature in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel in an expansive exploration of how nineteenth-century literature and science recast the monster as vital to the workings of nature and key to unlocking the knowledge of all life-forms and processes. Even as gothic literature and freak shows exploited an abiding association between abnormal bodies and horror, amazement, or failure, the development of monsters in the ideas and writings of this period showed the world to be dynamic, varied, plentiful, transformative, and creative.

In works ranging from Comte de Buffon’s interrogations of humanity within natural history to Hugo de Vries’s mutation theory, and from Shelley’s artificial man to fin de siècle notions of body difference, Mangham expertly traces a persistent attempt to understand modern subjectivity through a range of biological and imaginary monsters. In a world that hides monstrosity behind theoretical and cultural representations that reinscribe its otherness, this enlightened book shows how innovative nineteenth-century thinkers dismantled the fictive idea of normality and provided a means of thinking about life in ways that check the reflexive tendency to categorize and divide.Notes xi
Introduction 1
1 Monstrous Germs and Perpetual Formation 25
2 "Monster That I Am": Frankenstein's Filthy Creation 61
3 Arrested Developments and Aborted Archetypes 95
4 "Fantastic and Monkey-Like": Dickens's Curiosities 127
5 Recapitulations, Leaps, and Memories 159
6 Lucas Malet's "Faculty of Actualizing" 191
Coda: Modern Difference 227
Acknowledgments 241
Glossary 243
Notes 247
Bibliography 291
Index 319“In this clever study, Mangham […] explores how science and literature changed understandings of human difference during the 19th century. […]There’s as much science on offer as there is literary criticism, and Mangham proves he’s more than up to the challenge of teasing out the surprising overlap between the disciplines […]The result is a fascinating marriage of scientific history and literary analysis.”
—Publishers Weekly“For those fascinated by Nature’s monsters, her games and experiments on the shelves of medical museums, and uncanny fiction, Andrew Mangham is the perfect guide through labyrinthine nineteenth-century visions of anomalous bodies, both scientific and literary.”
—Eleanor Crook, Anatomical Sculptor and Artist in Residence, Gordon Museum of Pathology, King's College London; Morbid Anatomy European Attaché

“We Are All Monsters is a prescient work of original scholarship and thought that engages with the ongoing discourse of the last decade concerning the Postmillennial Gothic. Professor Andrew Mangham has not only brought science and the medical humanities into this crucial discussion about how we (should) define the monstrous, but he’s shown us that our current Gothic zeitgeist began, in fact, over two centuries ago in the medical sciences!”
—John Edgar Browning, professor of Liberal Arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design; co-editor, Speaking of Monsters: A Teratological AnthologyAndrew Mangham is Professor of Victorian Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Reading, UK. He is the author of The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy, Dickens’s Forensic Realism, and Violent Women and Sensation Fiction.