Victorian Racism

The Comparative Worth of Different Races from the Heredity Genius (1869), pioneering eugenicist Francis Galton makes several references to the relative superiority of Europeans compared to what he called 'the lower races'. Although Galton was a gifted statistician, he was a significant contributor to the development of racist ideology.

Galton's work appears online HERE.




Gatlon states "the number among the Negroes of those whom we should call half-witted men, is very large" saying Negores are"so childish, stupid, and simpleton-like, as frequently to make me ashamed of my own species".


Prominent Victorians—like George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells, Harold Laski, Charles Dickens—supported the idea of racial purity.

Many hold that the Victorians were the proto-type for the Nazis and set the ground work in motion for them to build upon.


With respect to Victorian Era holocausts, Lord Lytton, the Viceroy of India in 1876. It would be the same year famine broke out in southern India that claimed 5.5 million lives. Lytton wrote,

"The grim doctrines of Thomas Malthus... still held great sway over the white rajas. Although it was bad manners to openly air such opinions in front of the natives in Calcutta, Malthusian principles, updated by Social Darwinism, were regularly invoked to legitimize Indian famine policy at home in England".

Lytton’s administration pushed the Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 in England prohibiting private relief and charitable donations for starving Indians illegal & threatened imprisonment. In 1878, he pushed the Vernacular Press Act that gave him the power to confiscate the press and paper of a local language newspaper publishing 'seditious material'. There was a public outcry in Calcutta led by the Indian Association.

That Little Dickens!

From Channel 4's Victorian Passions website:

"Born in Portsmouth in 1812, the young Charles Dickens should have had a safe and secure childhood on his father's wages as a navy pay clerk. But John Dickens was plagued by money troubles. This culminated in 1824, when he was arrested and imprisoned for debt.

The young Charles, possibly on the very day of his twelfth birthday, was immediately sent to work, sticking labels on pots of shoe blacking in a rat-infested warehouse on the banks of the Thames. He earned a mere 8 or 9 shillings a week, visited his family in prison at weekends, and had, as he later put it, 'to undertake the whole charge of my own existence'."....

In 1857, acting in a play by his friend and novelist, Wilkie Collins, Dickens met and fell in love with an actress, Ellen (or Nelly) Ternan (pictured). She was 18 he was 45. Their meeting was to spark the most extraordinary and explosive mid-life crisis in Dickens and to change both of their lives for ever. In a matter of months, Dickens broke up his marriage of twenty years, quarrelled with many of his friend and began a relationship with Nelly that led to a double existence for the remainder of his life.

The secret lover
Although he never publicly acknowledged her (except briefly in his will), Ellen became the centre of Dickens' emotional life until his death in 1870. We still do not know for certain whether it was a sexual relationship or not, but it is quite possible that they had a child (or even children) together, although any hard evidence of this, and of so much else about their relationship, has been lost or destroyed.