Eugenics In Postwar British Culture

This study will examine the cultural influence of eugenic thought in post-war Britain. The project is an interdisciplinary one, with a particular focus on the representation of eugenic ideas in literature. The impact of eugenics in this period has been relatively overlooked, despite the fact that it had significant and long-term implications. There is currently much debate over what has been called the 'new eugenics', in other words the choices made possible by advances in genetic screening, and considerable controversy surrounds decisions to create 'saviour siblings' or terminate pregnancies if conditions such as Downs Syndrome have been diagnosed. But how have we arrived at a position where such eugenic choices have become part of everyday life? The study seeks to contextualise such questions by offering a cultural history of the eugenics movement in the post-war era. It starts from the premise that current preoccupations have their roots in a long-standing tradition of eugenic thought, one which flourished in post-war Britain and which was prominent in the literature and culture of the period. After the Second World War, just as after the Boer War and the First World War, there were widespread concerns in Britain about an apparent fall in the birth-rate and about a supposed decline in the quality as well as the quantity of the population. These concerns led to the setting up of a Royal Commission on Population which reported in 1949. Despite the fact that material from a wide range of professional and other interest groups was submitted to the Commission, its conclusions read as a distillation of eugenic propositions and proposals. It recommended positive eugenics in the form of incentives for the 'gifted' to have more children, negative eugenics in the form of marriage guidance aimed at limiting the families of the 'unfit' or defective, and also expressed fears about the impact of a falling birth-rate on the 'British' identity of the colonies. These were themes which were played out in a number of other arenas, for example in discussions of the structure of post-war education, debates about mental deficiency and its alleged connection with illegitimacy, criminality and alcoholism, and the development of government policy for 'Anglo-Saxon' emigration to the colonies. Immigration also became an increasingly contentious subject, as the drive to import cheap labour from the colonies gave way to fears of the population's being overwhelmed and contaminated by other 'racial' groups. Against this context, the study will examine the ways in which a wide range of literary and popular texts participated in and influenced such debates about the nature and structure of the 'ideal' population. It will consider the literary explorations of the themes of post-war social mobility and the tensions between genetic and class inheritance. It will investigate the representation of contemporary concerns about 'mental deficiency' and will chart the increasing significance of 'race' as a theme in fiction, drama and film. It will also assess the role of dystopian fiction in confronting the possibilities of nuclear catastrophe and of long-term damage from atomic radiation. By drawing together texts from a range of disciplines and contexts, the study will reconstruct the complex social and cultural field within which debates over the population took place and will assess the nature and extent of the impact of eugenic thought on literature and culture. In so doing it will illuminate a crucial episode in Britain's cultural history, one which has helped to shape many of the dilemmas which we face today.