Researchers says Victorian novels help social evolution

What do classic novels like Count Dracula, Middlemarch and Pride and Prejudice have in common? They all contributed to upholding the social order and made people more altruistic across Victorian society, says an analysis by evolutionary psychologists.

A team of evolutionary psychologists, spearheaded by Joseph Carroll at the University of Missouri in St Louis applied Darwin's theory of evolution to literature, asking 500 academicians to answer questionnaires on characters from 201 classic Victorian novels. Respondents were asked to define characters as protagonists or antagonists, rate their personality traits, and comment on their emotional response to the characters.

Their analysis puts forth that classic British novels from the 19th century reflect the values of Victorian society, and even helped shape them, as they laud the virtues of an egalitarian society, and pit traditional adversaries, cooperation and affability against individualistic power-hungry dominance.

In George Eliot's Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke chooses helping the poor while turning her back on wealth. Bram Stoker's Count Dracula personified the worst excesses of aristocratic dominance.

The researchers say leading characters fell of the novels fall into groups that mirror the cooperative nature of a hunter-gatherer society, where individual urges for power and wealth are suppressed for the good of the community. This upheld a sense of fairness and altruism in society at large, they say in the journal Evolutionary Psychology.

"By enforcing these norms, humans succeed in controlling 'free riders' or 'cheaters' and they thus make it possible for genuinely altruistic genes to survive within a social group.".