[Vwoolf] "Shocking"

[Stuart N. Clarke]

David Bradshaw wrote in "Eugenics: 'They Should Certainly Be Killed'" in "A Concise Companion to Modernism" (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003, p. 35: ‘just about every construction of race, class, and human values which we now find “shocking” was regarded not only as “satisfying and reasonable” during the modernist epoch, but imperative to national survival and a prerequisite of future success.’

VW wrote in “Three Guineas”: “Consider, even at the risk of a digression, what effect this proposed wage for those whose profession is marriage and motherhood would have upon the birth rate, in the very class where the birth rate is falling, in the very class where births are desirable—the educated class.”

VW’s sister-in-law, Bella, married the botanist and geneticist Robert Heath Lock (1879–1915), Assistant/Acting Director of the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens near Kandy in Ceylon.  His then-well-regarded book, "Recent Progress in the Study of Variation, Heredity, and Evolution", first published in 1906, revised editions 1909 & 1911, was revised after his death by Leonard Doncaster with a preface and a biographical* note by Bella.  Practically unchanged from the 1st edn is the following:

Professor Karl Pearson [a “scientific racist”, according to Wikipedia] has lately shown how the low birth-rate of the professional and  middle classes – the classes amongst which the intelligence of the nation is to a large extent segregated – leads to the recruiting of these classes from amongst the lower and less intelligent strata of society.  In other words, a steady breeding out of intelligence is taking place.  Recognising that intelligence is an important factor in national greatness, we proceed to remedy this defect by endeavouring to reduce the infant mortality among the less desirable classes, and by offering every inducement to the production of large families by the lower strata of society; indeed, we propose to remove from them all responsibility for the production of children, and to feed and house the latter as we already educate them at the expense of the State. (p. 324)

(Well, they could have started by providing birth-control information to the lower classes.)

Stuart

*Can anyone explain why she says she married Lock in England in 1910 (p. xv), while Glendinning’s biography of Leonard has it in Ceylon and mentions a specific location (p. 119)?
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