Aggregated News
How do you publish a novel arguing that the unfit, weak or mentally infirm should not be allowed to breed, and only those deemed “high quality” be given the privilege of having children?
Well, you don’t. Francis Galton tried to in the first decade of the 20th century, but he died in 1911 before his eugenic novel Kantsaywhere could be published. His family promptly got hold of it and, horrified, destroyed almost all of it.
Now though, to mark the 100th anniversary of his death, University College London has published all that remains online. You can download the book from their website, but good luck with reading it: it is published in the form of scans of Galton’s typewritten manuscript, complete with scribbled corrections.
Galton was a polymath who variously invented a system for fingerprinting, pioneered weather maps and made major contributions to social science. But his memory has been tainted by his longstanding obsession with eugenics.
Kantsaywhere is his attempt to sell the idea of eugenics to British society. It’s the story of Professor Donoghue, who...