"Murder, like talent, seems occasionally to run in families"
About this Quote
A tidy Victorian barb dressed up as observation, Lewes's line makes heredity sound like a parlor-room fact and then slips the knife in: we are oddly comfortable treating "talent" as pedigree, so why not "murder"? The wit works because it forces an unflattering symmetry. By pairing an admired trait with a taboo act, he mocks the social habit of laundering privilege into nature. If genius can be explained as bloodline, then so can brutality; the same logic that flatters the well-born also condemns them.
Lewes was writing in a century intoxicated by classification: phrenology, early criminology, Darwin's aftershocks, the new desire to map moral character onto biology. His phrasing, "seems occasionally", is doing crucial work. It keeps the claim from sounding like a scientific law while still letting the insinuation land. The word "run" is equally sly: it suggests both inheritance and pursuit, as if the family line is a chase you can't quite outrun.
The subtext is a critique of determinism and of respectable society's selective fatalism. Victorians loved the romance of lineage when it explained success; they were less eager to accept what that romance implies about violence, vice, and responsibility. Lewes doesn't offer comfort. He invites the reader to notice how quickly we naturalize outcomes we want to justify - and how flimsy the moral accounting becomes once biology is allowed to do too much narrative work. In a single sentence, he turns the era's faith in breeding into a dark joke about what, exactly, we think we inherit.
Lewes was writing in a century intoxicated by classification: phrenology, early criminology, Darwin's aftershocks, the new desire to map moral character onto biology. His phrasing, "seems occasionally", is doing crucial work. It keeps the claim from sounding like a scientific law while still letting the insinuation land. The word "run" is equally sly: it suggests both inheritance and pursuit, as if the family line is a chase you can't quite outrun.
The subtext is a critique of determinism and of respectable society's selective fatalism. Victorians loved the romance of lineage when it explained success; they were less eager to accept what that romance implies about violence, vice, and responsibility. Lewes doesn't offer comfort. He invites the reader to notice how quickly we naturalize outcomes we want to justify - and how flimsy the moral accounting becomes once biology is allowed to do too much narrative work. In a single sentence, he turns the era's faith in breeding into a dark joke about what, exactly, we think we inherit.
Quote Details
| Topic | Dark Humor |
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