SOURCE: "Archive and Form," in The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire, Verso, 1993, pp. 45-65.

In the following extract, Richards explores the connections between the discourses of morphology and monstrosity in Victorian fiction.

This chapter is about the place of monstrosity in the nineteenth-century imperial imagination. Until Bram Stoker's Dracula, there are few monsters in Victorian fiction. In Victorian literature ghosts, those images of a nether world replete with human significance, are more common than monsters, and it is worth asking why. Victorian travellers like Richard Burton and Henry Stanley never saw monsters. In his Voyage of the Beagle (1831-36) Darwin travelled around the world without seeing one. Thomas Henry Huxley doubted whether monsters ever existed, even in the distant past. In Poe 'monstrous' is always an adjective, never a noun, and monstrosity resides in the behavioral perversions of the self, as it does in Lombroso...