In 1870, colonial Melbourne was 'perspiring juvenile humanity' with an astonishing 42 per cent of the city's inhabitants aged 14 and under - a demographic anomaly resulting from the gold rushes of the 1850s. I argue in this essay that the nascent ideas about euthanasia of the early and middle Victorian period became full-fledged philosophies in the late-Victorian period and that Malthusian philosophy and Darwinian-informed theories were manipulated by novelist and theorist-turned- novelists, resulting in euthanasia becoming a tool in class warfare and in the fight to eradicate social undesirables for their good and for the good of society.īaby booms have a long history. The future was a place where the mistakes or triumphs of today dictated the course of human progress. The future was not a bubble, untouched by time or trouble, but a field of battle, where ideas could be tested and philosophies given a test drive. Themes and plots were varied, but they always reflected some facet of contemporary society. It was a safe haven for invasion narratives, for socialist paradises or hells, for worlds ruled by benevolent machines, or worlds ruined by mechanical dependence. In the latter part of the nineteenth century future or speculative fiction became big business in Britain. In exploring how Trollope’s depiction of the future illuminates the seamy side of utopian productivism, I therefore suggest that he debunks the myth of youth, efficiency, and progress, which governed Victorian Britain. That is, although Trollope locates the mandatory euthanasia system in the future, his portrayal of it as a pivotal means of national regeneration serves to problematize the late Victorian reality, in which people felt a need to increase the size of the young and efficient generation and decrease that of the old and inefficient generation in order to prevent collective degeneration.

It is necessary to note that Trollope’s interpretation of the future without decline-without the elderly-is satiric, for he indeed speaks about the present society, obsessed with the ideology of progress. In reading how Period portrays aging as a sign not only of personal deterioration but also of social inefficiency, I situate the text in the late nineteenth-century context, in which euthanasia was viewed as a countermeasure against large-scale degeneration.

In this article, I examine Anthony Trollope’s futuristic fiction The Fixed Period (1882) to discuss how the author criticizes Victorian Britain’s general pursuit of national efficiency by depicting a seemingly utopian nation where euthanasia of old and less productive individuals is used as an expedient means of implementing utopian values.

The Fixed Period by Anthony Trollope