Euston is briefly saved from having to confront this reality by, ironically, the return of the medical men, who offer some temporary hope for his father. But Mr. Ferrol’s collapse is inevitably, if not immediately, fatal, and many pages later the novel’s eye returns to him to witness his final decline and death:

Confronted with this entirely unsubtle selection of degeneration imagery arrayed against him, the elder Hugh Ferrol attempts to cling to hope on more or less the same terms, wishing for regeneration and physical improvement, bolstered by the hopes of medical science. “I soon shall be [able to attend to business,” he says: “did not Doctor Proby say so?” (51). Minutes later, he declares, “I think I walk better than I am yesterday. . . I think I am better” (52).

We can only conjecture as to what the outcome of his case might have been, in the world of the novel, if he had been willing to accompany his wishes for physical reinvigoration with a commitment to a spiritual one. As it happens, he does not, and so his fate is the predictable one. And as the descent into death is described in increasingly abstract terms, the novel takes a parting shot at the men of science:

The relationship between the moral alarmists and science thus ends on an amusingly mercenary note: science is useful when its language or theories can be used to stir up alarm, but power to resolve the fears it causes is still held out of its grasp. One might be reminded of more recent moral panics surrounding biological bogeymen, such as the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s!

If the purpose of the elder Mr. Hugh Ferrol is to caution readers against being willing to morally compromise themselves in order to maintain a high social standing, then the tale of the confusingly named (and, as mentioned, still not the last of the book’s Hughs) Dr. Ferrol is a cautionary one against not reaching too high in the first place. An-up-and-coming doctor who is attempting to cast himself as a city physician, ministering to the relatively affluent classes rather than the book’s implied alternative of becoming a more humble doctor to the poor or rural dwellers, “Dr. Hugh” soon learns--or perhaps unwisely decides, led astray by the influence of his social-climbing mother and other family members--that to “keep up appearances” of the proper sort for a higher-class doctor requires paying rent in the city, retaining a fancy carriage and coachman, and any number of other things that together combine to make him and his wife live above their means. When a crisis looms, Dr. Hugh eventually submits to the temptation to forge his brother-in-law’s signature on a bank-bill in the hopes that he can pay it back himself before it comes due. The offended party, Mr. Wardour, learns of the forgery but decides, in a model of Christian charity, to cover the bill himself. The law, when the debts catch up with the doctor anyway, is not so charitable, and soon Dr. Hugh finds himself jailed while his case awaits judgment.

Here the ‘punishment’ of Dr. Hugh for his intemperance takes two distinctly different, and successive, stages, both of which play upon the fear of a Fall. First, the nights that the doctor spends jailed take the form of a vision in which the torments of Hell are paraded in front of the sinner. The jail is a bedlam or inferno of noise, “peals of laughter” and “comic songs” filling its “dismal stone passages” (181); however the author tries to tell us that the residents are “far from despondency,” it is difficult to see their mirth as in any way enviable or other than pathetic. Dr. Hugh asks who his raucous neighbors are, and is told,

As the author helpfully clarifies, the turnkey clearly has “a species of professional respect” for this great man.

While it is hardly necessary to have the models of Darwin in order to remonstrate against a career of financial risk, the rapidly changing complexion of the public imagination at this time could not have helped but color the image of the unsubtly named Mr. Swyndle (the modern meaning of swindle was already current in 1860). What Walshe offers the reader is a glimpse of natural selection perverted: accepting the axiom that the fittest will rise to the top, she dives to the core of The Ferrol Family’s moral by reminding that ‘fittest’ must be properly defined as well. What leads to economic evolution may yet bring into the bargain moral and societal degeneration. Swyndle and his partners, along with the elder (and now deceased) Mr. Hugh Ferrol, have displayed traits that are in some sense selected for: the ability to make money, perhaps, or simply to “make noise” in the papers (and, cleverly, in their jail cells). Walshe shows--perhaps unconsciously--how an organism, to use the Darwinian metaphor, can appear to thrive yet ultimately prove maladapted.

If the preceding seems to be getting somewhat too abstract, then never fear; the family of Dr. Hugh receives its punitive downfall in the physiological sense as well. Here it is not the sinner himself whose vitality fails, but his wife’s instead, in a Biblically cruel twist (literally: the displacement of moral punishment onto the innocent reminds one of the death of David and Bathsheba’s child). Dr. Hugh has, as summarized by the story, done what society expects of him; he has gone through the “usual stages” and “due course” of legal recovery from insolvency (193); and, released from the court at last, he goes home to find his wife sickened and dying: not from any primarily physical malady, but from the sheer weight, or “shock,” of the legal and financial humiliation.

As her husband bemoans and Agatha does not fully deny, he has been a “blight on her life”; the term is something more than a figure of speech here, as his misdeeds cause her (however improbably) to waste away and die as surely as any more physical illness. The punishments for the crimes of Dr. Hugh are thus reified in the flesh at last, just when one is thinking we might escape the novel without anyone else paying more than the legal or pecuniary penalties for their sins. Smacking of authorial fiat as it does, this conclusion to the story neatly revisits the fear, newly substantiated by pseudoscience, of the link between moral and physiological ill-fortune.

The Ferrol Family did not itself instigate or represent a watershed moment in the "evolution," so to speak, of Victorian moral or scientific thought. However, it and its context in the Leisure Hour offer an interesting and perhaps useful look at the genesis of a popular intellectual trend that would, as described above, become more concrete as the mid-century gave way to the fin-de-siecle. They show that in 1860, the readers of a periodical whose primary audiences included the working or servant class could be expected to not only understand, but be curious about, anthropological and biological theories of the day; furthermore, that these theories were implicitly seen as 'uplifting' by the moral gatekeepers on the publication's editorial staff and that they were correlated with moral lessons in the fiction that ran alongside them. If the correlations are in some ways still nascent, subtle and obscure, then, like the famous Galapagos finches of Darwin himself, they may still point us in a useful direction.