A History of British Eugenics since 1865: From Francis Galton to Designer Babies. By DavidRedvaldsen. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024, pp. xix, 331. £119.99.

A History of British Eugenics since 1865 is meticulously researched. David Redvaldsen has ploughed through a wide variety of writing on the subject starting with Galton's 1865 article in Macmillan's Magazine, in which he lays out his basic hereditarian ideas (although he does not coin the term ‘eugenics’ until 1883). Redvaldsen has read all of Galton's writings, numerous letters between eugenists and much paraphernalia of the Galton Laboratory at University College, London, and the Eugenics Society (some of which may have been quite a trial). He takes his study right up into the twentieth-first century, showing how eugenics is alive and well, although rarely named as such. As a practice of selective breeding, eugenics has of course existed for centuries in relation to cattle, horses, sheep and dogs, but as a method applied to humankind, it took Charles Darwin's cousin Galton to see the possibilities. Eugenics was a protean ideology that had members spanning from the political right (including a few fascists, such as George Pitt-Rivers) through to socialists such as H. G. Wells, G. B. Shaw and the Webbs and a grouping later termed ‘reform’ eugenists, committed to meritocracy. Formal membership of the Society was always below a thousand, but its impact was far wider than this might imply. It was at its height in Britain in the interwar years but had its greatest success pre-war, with the Mental Deficiency Act 1913, which segregated in institutions those deemed ‘idiots’, ‘imbeciles’, feeble-minded’ or ‘moral imbeciles’ (the latter applied particularly to girls or young women thought to have acted ‘waywardly’, for example bearing an illegitimate child). Indeed, the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded 1904–1908 had been an important impetus for the formation of the Eugenics Education Society (which changed its name to the Eugenics Society in 1926). In the interwar years, although not managing to persuade the government to introduce ‘voluntary’ sterilization (the qualifying inverted commas are there to show that it was never thought of as being fully voluntary for the ‘mentally deficient’), Redvaldsen demonstrates that there was much support for such a measure from what may seem unlikely bodies, such as the Women's Co-operative Guild (who appeared to think that men's sterilization would lessen sexual abuse), and a number of Labour Party women members, including Ellen Wilkinson MP. The Ministry of Health government committee that considered sterilization 1932–34 favoured its introduction too, but the government did not think the general public was ready for such a measure. It was introduced elsewhere though, in certain US states and in Denmark, for example, as well as in Germany. Surprisingly, Germany's ‘final solution’ does not appear to have discredited British eugenics to any great degree. The Eugenics Society disavowed any parallel to Germany and kept its name right up until 1989. It then became the Galton Institute, centring on genetics (although some geneticists are certainly eugenists). It became linked to a number of ‘progressive’ issues, such as birth control (it had been involved with Marie Stopes's organization since the 1920s), abortion (the Eugenics Society supported the 1967 Act and was delighted that abortions were then used in relation to Down's syndrome) and over-population of the planet. It welcomed pre-natal screening, amniocentesis and in vitro fertilization (IVF) (Robert Edwards, one of the instigators of the procedure, was a Eugenics Society member). Although the emphasis became individual choice, the eugenical hope was that disabilities would be reduced though such choices. One eugenic ‘success’ that Redveldsen does not spell out is the introduction of the 11+, an IQ test that selected children aged 10 or 11 for different kinds of education. This often had disastrous effects, with children who did not get to grammar school feeling they were inferior and often being treated as such. A key instigator of the test was eugenist Cyril Burt, whose twin studies were not discredited until 1976, a few years after his death. This is a very accomplished book in many ways, but I have two quibbles, one very small, the other less so. The small quibble relates to the name of Karl Pearson's wife: it was Maria Sharpe, not Sharples. The other quibble relates to Redvaldsen's use of the concept ‘race’. He appears to deploy it in the same manner as Galton, namely as a vague, all-inclusive term that might mean the human race, the Anglo-Saxon race or the white race, varying according to context. It would have helped had Redvaldsen pointed this out. I also think he underestimates British eugenists’ interest in race relations, and not just in the post Second World War period. While it is true that eugenics in Britain, unlike the United States, was more explicitly concerned with class than race, Galton had argued in 1883 that the improvement of stock involved not simply selective breeding, but ‘cognisance of all influences that tend…to give more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable’. And there were quite a number of eugenical studies and articles about the dangers of miscegenation. That said, this is an important and impressive book that will from now on be the definitive go-to text for anyone interested in the history of British eugenics. What is so especially striking about this work is its demonstration of how eugenics has managed to reinvent itself for each age. We should be alert to how so many of the reproductive choices facing us today, including the idea of the ‘designer baby’, are informed by eugenical concerns that have entered popular culture by the back door. Galton would have been proud.