‘The Lay of the Trilobite’: Rereading May Kendall

The impact of Darwin theory of evolution by natural selection on the culture of late Victorian England and on the development of Western thought at large is at once widely acknowledged and hotly contested. In this essay, I revisit the question of what difference an understanding of Darwin’s ideas, their reception and their afterlife within evolutionary biology makes to how we read Victorian poetry. I suggest that there are three distinct ways of approaching poetry after Darwin. The first is to examine poems in their own cultural context, considering how they respond to the scientific discourses of their time in the light of internal and external evidence as to the specific sources of each poet's knowledge of those discourses. The second is to ground an interpretative framework in Darwinism’s insights into human biology itself. The third is to explore how a given poem’s responses to the philosophical issues raised by Darwin’s thinking, including questions of ethics and theology, give its readers a possible model for their own responses to the same concerns today. I suggest too that the limitations of each approach may be best overcome by bringing them together. I go on to explore the potential of the first and third approaches through a reading of May Kendall’s poem ‘The Lay of the Trilobite’ in a series of different contexts, from its first appearance in ‘Punch’, through her first collection Dreams to Sell, to her essays on Christian ethics from the 1880s and 1890s.

warning against taking our place in evolution too seriously. It is effective partly because it is uncomplicated. The characterisation is deft but nevertheless broad, while the comedy works too easily and too well to need much glossing. There seems to be little in the poem to tempt scholars of literature and science to write about it either. It responds to evolutionary debate, but only on a general level. There are no indicators that Kendall has any specific tenet of evolutionary theory in her sights, as Constance Naden does in her equally funny but much more widely discussed skits on sexual selection grouped together as 'Evolutional Erotics' (1887). Nor is Kendall responding to any particular controversy here, such as the spat between Huxley and Gladstone over whether or not the geological record could be reconciled with the book of Genesis to which she alludes in her poem 'Nirvana'. Nor is she obviously working through her own ideas on evolution, as many late-Victorian poets including Tennyson, Meredith, an awkward subject. Her life has come down to us more as a series of detached fragments than as a single whole, while her diverse corpus includes poetry, novels, prose satires, socio-political studies and religious journalism. The task of making sense of Kendall's long and diffuse career is therefore much more daunting and arguably less inviting than the equivalent task of understanding Naden's short, well documented and intellectually focussed one.
In this essay I want to try and push beyond this apparent critical impasse towards a deeper understanding of Kendall's poem and of Kendall's own place in Victorian debates over the interpretation of evolution. To do so, I am going to reread 'The Lay of the Trilobite' in a series of distinct contexts. The first two contexts are those of the poem's original publication, in Punch magazine on 24 January 1885, and its subsequent inclusion in the collection Dreams to Sell (1887) as the first poem in a series headed 'Science'. In both cases I will be looking for clues that might steer a reader towards an interpretation of Kendall's particular engagement with evolutionary theory. I will then move on to consider the poem in the light of Kendall's writings as a Christian thinker and activist from the end of the 1880s to the late 1890s, to see how a fuller reading of her work might inflect and flesh out our understanding of this engagement. In conclusion, I will take Kendall's review of Hardy's Wessex Poems as a starting point for briefly placing her perspective on evolution within the wider context of the evolutionary poetry of her contemporaries Tennyson, Meredith and Hardy.

II 'The Lay of the Trilobite' in Punch
Before readers encountered 'The Lay of the Trilobite' in its first published form they would have already passed through a series of experiences framing their responses to the poem itself. Firstly, they would have bought or borrowed a copy of Punch.
Depending on their reading habits, they may or may not have read other pieces in this particular issue of the magazine, but they would undoubtedly have had certain expectations about the material they were to find within it. Punch's attitude to science in the 1880s was irreverent but not hostile nor obviously partisan. It was most often inspired to play with science which had practical applications, such as medicine or technology, or highly visible manifestations, such as comets or mammoths. When it did engage with science for its own sake, it was generally unsigned. This affirms the impression that the poem is a house-production rather than a work by a particular poet. In effect, the implied 'author' is Mr Punch himself, who, like Huxley and Carpenter, gets a reference in the poem (l. 36).
As well as the magazine and the title, the original readers of 'The Lay of the Trilobite' encountered the poem accompanied by an illustration, positioned between the title and the text, and so directly mediating the response to the poem itself. This illustration shows the encounter between the poem's two speakers on a rocky mountain top. The narrator is looking somewhat aghast and raising his hat, while the trilobite looks as though he is smiling up at him. The narrator's initial response to chancing upon the trilobite in the poem is to watch him while tearfully contemplating the beauty of 'The providential plan, / That he should be a Trilobite, / And I should be a Man' (ll. [14][15][16]. The picture does not illustrate this first impression, however, but rather the poem's close, when the narrator takes his leave of the trilobite, touching his hat (in fact he raises it in the picture, as he does in the revised version of the poem) but not speaking, as he wishes to himself 'that Evolution could / Have stopped a little quicker' (ll. 67-68). The expression on the faces of the two characters in the illustration leads the reader to anticipate that the trilobite will in some way get the better of the man, piquing our interest to see how this might happen.
By the standards of cartoons in Punch, the illustration to 'The Lay of the Trilobite' is clumsy, even crude, and yet its characters remain notable. The narrator is not clearly delineated as a caricature of anyone in particular, but he bears at least a passing resemblance to Richard Owen, with his bald pate and straggly white hair.
Owen was a leading advocate of providential interpretations of evolution, while Huxley, who is cited by the trilobite as an authority both on evolution and on 'How all your faiths are ghosts and dreams' (l. 25), was his most vocal critic. The clash between the two men over human evolution was most publicly played out in the early 1860s, but they remained public figures and known opponents. The poem does not explicitly target Owen, and nor does the illustration, but the illustration might well lead a reader to identify the self-satisfied narrator with, if not as, Owen. Read in the light of the illustration, the poem can seem to be a comic restaging of the antagonism between Huxley and Owen which broadly sides with Huxley, as the trilobite, who disillusions the providential evolutionist, defers to Huxley's authority.
The trilobite in the picture bears no resemblance to Huxley, but he is anthropomorphised, with his antennae resembling eyebrows and his legs positioned in such a way as to suggest a thick moustache growing on either side of a thin nose.
Aside from this anthropomorphic re-jigging of his bodily structure, the most remarkable thing about the trilobite in the illustration is that it is not a trilobite at all but a eurypterid or sea-scorpion, an entirely different form of extinct marine arthropod. Eurypterids were well known among palaeontologists in the late nineteenth century, and the distinction between them and trilobites was well established. They lacked the public profile of trilobites, however. The fact that Punch illustrates a poem about a trilobite with a picture of a eurypterid strongly suggests that the trilobite was for this particular illustrator and the magazine's editor, and perhaps for Kendall too, a vague concept -some form of ancient fossil from the 'Silurian seas' (l. 7), as the poem puts it -rather than a clear palaeontological type. with science. It seems reasonable to suppose that most original readers would have shared that same level of engagement and expected no more. They would have read 'The Lay of the Trilobite' as a light-hearted lampoon of providential evolutionism in keeping with the magazine as a whole. Those readers who were sufficiently scientifically well-informed to recognise that the trilobite in the picture was not a In other poems in the group, the comedy derives less from particular scientific ideas or practices than from the speakers' attitudes to science itself. In 'The Lower Life', the speaker, recalling the providential evolutionist at the end of 'Lay of the Trilobite, laments the fact that humanity's mental evolution has come at the cost of peace, pleasure and opportunities lost. In '"Taking Long Views"', the narrator tries to persuade his interlocutor of the evolutionary advance of humanity only to be repeatedly brought up short by the man's despair at not knowing whether, in the distant future, centrifugal force will carry the Earth away from the sun or centripetal force will cause it to fall into the sun. In this poem the two voices and more generally at all readings of evolution that see it as progressive, for all that she appears happy to invoke progressive evolution for her own feminist purposes in 'Woman's Future' (a point I will return to towards the end of this essay). science. This is not a weakness, however, but a strength. 'When men cast away the last shred of false certainty', as she writes in this essay, 'their trust only grows stronger in life, and death, and in themselves'. 8 The complacency of the providential evolutionist in 'The Lay of the Trilobite' is dependent on false certainties, which is why he is so vulnerable to their exposure by Huxley and the trilobite, for all that their own certainties as represented in the poem may be false in turn.
In 'Fear and Hate', Kendall writes that to affirm trust in life, death and oneself is 'equivalent to saying: In God'. 9 The She rejects this utopian model of socialism, remarking that 'In whatever utopia, the weakest must go to the wall -a respectable wall it may be, and well cushioned, but a wall nevertheless'. 10 Kendall is not arguing against the alleviation of poverty by the state per se. But she is arguing that such alleviation can never be a social panacea, as it is premised on the assumption that material needs come first. Her own position, by contrast, is that people's spiritual and moral well-being must come first, and that social reform, including material betterment, must follow and will follow from proper religious commitment.
Kendall is careful to outline what she means by such a commitment. In her eyes the prime moral danger is selfishness, which she does not hesitate to label 'sin'.
This is not merely a material matter, a case of the actions one performs and their practical consequences. Remorse, the vanity and self-satisfaction of philanthropy, 'the glamour of moral obligation' cast over society's 'more repulsive vices, such as avarice or greed', are all selfish motives for actions or bequests that are ostensibly benevolent. 11 So too is the desire for one's own immortality. For Kendall, the main failing of the otherwise noble enterprise of the Salvation Army is that it encourages people to put their hope in an essentially material concept of eternity: an everlasting Heaven. 'Multiply time indefinitely', Kendall writes, 'and it is still time'. 12 What is needed is not the promise of immortality but the realisation that love and the deeds motivated by love transcend both self and time. By contrast, 'the wages of sin is death', not literally in hellfire, but because the sinful soul 'is merged in desires of the most perishable things'. 13 The relevance of these arguments to 'The Lay of the Trilobite' lies in the characterization of its narrator. He is the very type of self-satisfaction. In 'The Social Ideal', Kendall notes that 'Somewhere Mr. Spencer seems to think that one day the biddings of egoism and altruism will coincide', commenting sardonically that 'that day, at all events, is too far remote to need consideration', and noting that 'in the meantime no amount of appeal to egoistic motives will ever produce a democracy' or 'a utopia'. 14 Like Herbert Spencer, the narrator of 'The Lay of the Trilobite' is too complacent that evolution will, indeed has, brought about the 'providential plan'. He makes this mistake in part because he perceives God's will as operating through time rather than as transcending it. The 'basis of all religions', Kendall argues, is the recognition of 'the difference between things temporal and things eternal'. 15 Whether one calls oneself a Christian or an atheist, if one recognises this, one is religious, while to fail to see this is 'the true atheism'. 16 The narrator's theism is on these terms no more than an empty piety.
Kendall explains the dangers of complacency in a fourth essay for the Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine, 'The Brotherhood of Sin', published in 1898. 'As our self-satisfaction waxes,' she observes, 'our sympathy wanes', because 'we institute mental comparisons between ourselves and those whom we desire to serve' which 'are always to our own advantage'. 17  Kendall's claim that these famous agnostics are in fact religious is premised on a concept of religion that is itself predicated on ethics, not dogma. Kendall uses the language of Christianity in her essays, but she recasts the key concepts of God, sin and the soul in terms that are deliberately ecumenical and can even remain applicable within an otherwise secular worldview. In 'The Fear of Death', she redefines the 'soul' as 'so much of the thought and will of the universe as somehow both is the man and is in his keeping'. Kendall insists that 'we must save our souls, not because they are ours, but because they are nothing of the kind'. Instead of appealing to the familiar notion that a person's soul is merely on loan from God, however, she characterises it rather as 'a converging and diverging point of influences, where these are altered for better or worse'. It is this capacity to influence others that imposes 'responsibility' on us. Our souls, Kendall writes, 'are streams we may poison or purify; but if we think we are the only ones who will drink of them, we are mistaken'. 21 Kendall's ethical position here is grounded in her own Christianity, but it does not require any specific theology, or even any theology at all, to sustain it.
For Kendall, to have faith in God is to live by an ethical imperative which admits this responsibility, recognising that real value -like God himselftranscends time. If we can realise that that which lasts of us is not our physical or even our mental existences but rather, contra Mark Antony, the good that we do, providing it is done sincerely and so not intrinsically enfeebled and corrupt, then we can learn better to accept the limits of our temporal existence. 'Death is the complete readjustment of the molecules of the brain, which comes alike to saint and sinner', Kendall observes with wry detachment, but 'Men of science are not afraid of molecules'. 22 Kendall's insistence that the sphere of religion should be kept strictly separate from the sphere of material science recalls the position Tennyson held with increasing tenacity in his later poetry, for all that he flirted with Owen's providential evolutionism. 23 But Tennyson was profoundly afraid of molecules, and could not live without immortality. So for all that Kendall is clear in her own mind, in her rhetoric and indeed in her decision to formulate her arguments in the pages of the