Elizabeth Hely Walshe’s novel The Ferrol Family was serialized in the pages of The Leisure Hour between January 5th and March 29th of 1860. The novel is not a famous one or even familiar one--in fact, it is so obscure that chances are if one knows about it, one is either a particularly committed scholar of mid-century Victorian publishing or has happened across it through pure serendipity. There is by most standards nothing exceptionally remarkable in the text itself, at least when one considers it to those whom history has treated more kindly--the works of the Dickenses, Braddons, and Collinses, as it were, of the period. What does make The Ferrol Family interesting, for our purposes, are two facts, one deliberate and one an accident of history. The deliberate: The Ferrol Family was written for and bought by The Leisure Hour, a family magazine produced by the Religious Tract Society as a reaction to a perceived lack of wholesomeness in the magazines and publications of the day. Its inclusion in those pages constituted an endorsement by the sort of thinkers and gatekeepers who were attempting to frame and harness the moral imagination of mid-Victorian Britain. The accidental: The Ferrol Family’s run in The Leisure Hour took place less than two months after Charles Darwin’s seminal and famous work, On The Origin of Species, was published.

 What resulted was a vignette of an intersection being played out across the educated society of the day between the decades-old moral imagination and the nascent scientific one. Though The Ferrol Family does not breathe a word of Darwin in its pages and only mentions medical science in passing, its themes demonstrate a fertile ground for the hybridization of the new evolutionary theory with extant fears of moral decay. The fears of degeneration thus produced in turn intersected with and reinforced pseudoscientific beliefs about race and criminality. These beliefs would continue to grow clearer and gain weight through the fin-de-siecle and beyond, but the pages of The Leisure Hour in the first months of 1860 offer a window into their germination, a glimpse all the more striking, once unearthed, for its innocent obscurity.