Assessing Intelligence: The Bildungsroman and the Politics of Human Potential in England, 1860-1910

How did Victorian novelists engage with the new theories of human intelligence that emerged from late nineteenth-century psychology and evolutionary science? Assessing Intelligence traces the genealogy of the modern concept of IQ. It examines how five writers - George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, HG Wells and Virginia Woolf - used the bildungsroman, or the novel of education, to wrestle with the moral and political implications of the IQ model of intelligence and the fantasies of meritocracy it provoked. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière, Sara Lyons argues that Victorian and Edwardian novelists were by turns complicit in the biopolitics of intelligence and sought radical ways to affirm the equality of minds.

Sara Lyons is a Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Kent. She is the author of Algernon Charles Swinburne and Walter Pater: Victorian Aestheticism, Doubt, and Secularisation (Legenda, 2015) and various journal articles and book chapters on nineteenth-century literature and culture. Between 2017 and 2019, she was the Principal Investigator on an AHRC-funded project entitled ’Literary Culture, Meritocracy, and the Assessment of Intelligence in Britain and America, 1880-1920’. This book is a product of that project.