The savage worlds of Henry Drummond (1851-1897): science, racism and religion in the work of a popular evolutionist

The savage was a familiar as well as deeply problematic figure in late-Victorian literary and scientific imaginaries. Savages provided an unstable but capacious and flexible signifier to explore human development and human difference, most often in ways that followed a disturbing racial logic. In this paper, the rhetorical roles played by savage fabulations in the popular writings of the Scottish evangelist, evolutionist and traveller, Henry Drummond (1851–97), are subject to scrutiny. Drummond's varied corpus of extraordinarily popular writings provides a particularly revealing example of the prevalence and potency of the savage as an organising category for dealing with human difference in an age permeated by both religious and evolutionary beliefs about humanity. Drummond's efforts to create a form of Christian evolutionism relevant to, and transformative of, the lives of evangelical Christians leant heavily on the savage as a trope useful for conveying this new religious vision of evolution. In so doing, Drummond reinforced and revised the racial reasoning that infused so much late-Victorian savage discourse and propagated it to a mass religious audience across several continents.