| PDF eBook, 324 pages Published 1897 Read December 2018 |
"I want to know how this research is going on, and how it will end."The characters speaking in my epigraph above are the two central figures of this novel: Claudius Sandell, a would-be novelist, and Gabriel Lamb, a doctor who's ended his private practice to devote himself purely to research. Claudius's life has reached a low point, and he almost dies on the street, penniless and homeless, but for the ministrations of Lamb. Claudius is initially willing to do anything for Lamb, and ends up promising to serve him the rest of his life in exchange for eight days of freedom: eight days where Lamb will give Claudius £1,000 per day to use as he pleases.
"It will go on and end in the service of humanity. If I gave you the details, I think that you would regard me rather as a quack than as a doctor—a quack with the restless ambitions of a mad man." (101)
You might guess that Lamb has nefarious motives, otherwise there wouldn't be a plot, and you'd be right. Lamb is clearly intended as a critique of the motivations and practices of vivisectionists, who claimed to be causing pain for the greater good of humanity. Sometimes, anti-vivisection novels criticized this as a self-serving lie; these men are just out to cause pain and/or for their own self-interest, and vivisection furthers those goals (e.g., Heart and Science, The Beth Book). Sometimes, anti-vivisection novels were willing to believe this was true, but explored the harm it causes regardless (e.g., The Professor's Wife).
It's hard to put Lamb in The Octave of Claudius in either category. He definitely sees the world differently than other people; in one scene, he looks out his window at London: "Each man of them is nothing as an individual. Charles Peace and William Shakespeare were both accidents" (101). When he explains why he gave up his practice, he says, "I asked myself if that kind of thing [helping an individual patient] was science as I loved it—if it really assisted the great cause of humanity for which alone I live. I gave up my practice. I study the individual man only when he is likely to throw light on the aggregate. I never work on behalf of the individual" (22-3). If it was just down to his conversations with Claudius, I'd be inclined to believe him. He's going to have to leave the country to do what he wants to Claudius; he'll never get acclaim for what he learns within his lifetime, but he's okay with this if it helps humanity in the long run: "I certainly have my reward. You have noticed, perhaps, that only people with imagination lay down wine. The old man in his cellar, storing the vintage that he knows he cannot live to drink, tastes in that moment all its unborn perfections that one day his grandson overhead will praise" (100).
But one of the other key characters in the novel is Lamb's wife, Hilda. They used to have a good marriage, but it fell apart at some point, apparently after the death of their only child; now Lamb tells her, "My interest in you is largely scientific" (33). But when Hilda gets hysterical at one point, he beats her with a whip, literalizing the metaphorical connection between vivisection and domestic abuse I've noticed in The Beth Book and Lynton Abbott's Children. Lamb claims to take no pleasure in what he does to Claudius, but it's impossible to read what he says and does to Hilda and not believe that he doesn't derive satisfaction from it. So he might genuinely be doing terrible things to further the human race... but he clearly also has failed as a husband, which thus means he's failed in one of his most basic ethical obligations according to the Victorians.
Like a lot of these anti-vivisection books, it's not great-- basically everything Claudius does when Lamb is not present is dead boring, especially his dull romance-- but it contains fascinating nuggets of how science and scientists were seen in the late Victorian period. I'm very glad I took the time to read it, and I feel like it ought to make it into my book.
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