Martin Brookes

« Although racist attitudes were not new to the nineteenth century, the rationale behind the racism had shifted significantly since the days of the Enlightenment. Race, in the Victorian sense of the word, was a broad term that represented differences not just in ethnicity, but in class and social status. In the first decades of the nineteenth century many European thinkers had begun to question why social divisions remained so entrenched in prosperous and progressive nations like Britain and France. Instead of emancipating the people, the industrial revolution had merely reinforced social hierarchies and, in some cases, created new ones. The inner-city slum, for instance, became a potent image of the early Victorian era and a source of great social and philosophical concern. Why did such grinding poverty persist ? Why had progress touched the lives of some people and not others ?
The Victorian solution to this problem was to move away from the Enlightenment view that all men were inherently equal and to assert the exact opposite. In this revised social scheme, the poor could not escape their poverty because they were intrinsically incapable of doing so. » (p. 113)

« In an attempt to patch up relations, the King had presented Galton with his niece Chipanga as a temporary wife for the night. But while Chipanga did her best to get him in the mood, a nervous Galton could only fret about getting greasy fingerprints all over his white linen suit. She was, he claimed, 'as capable of leaving a mark on anything she touched as a well-inked printer's roller... So I had her ejected with scant ceremony'.
The rebuke was a personal insult to both Nangoro and his niece. » (pp. 97-98)

« There is a certain irony in the fact that the person who discovered correlation couldn't interpret his own results because he was still thinking in terms of simple cause and effect. But Galton's misunderstanding was to prove costly. His stubborn belief in the all-importance of heredity led him to overlook the influence of the environment, and head off in search of explanations for a bogus biological law. » (p. 233)

« In a letter to his father his bitterness was palpable: "I feel more convinced every day that if there is a thing more to be repressed than another it is certainly the system of competition, for the satisfaction enjoyed by the gainers is very far from counterbalancing the pain it produces among the others." » (p. 50)