"Dabbling in Delicate Drugs": Aristocracy, Darwinism, and Substance Abuse in M. P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud

M. P. Shiel's post-apocalyptic novel, The Purple Cloud (1901), offers Darwinian commentary on the suitability of upper-class socio-political rule, depicting aristocracy's struggles for basic survival despite their privilege and supposedly superior breeding. Through characters' recreational use narcotics, Shiel interrogates "survival fittest," adaptability, sexual selection, hierarchies in animal world as they are perverted by human class structures. For Shiel, is a product luck or chance: aristocracy largely results from right bodies existing environment at time. This discussion triangulates thorny points substance abuse, survival, and, that triangulation, finds more cohesive if pessimistic argument regarding role origins future humanity, structures organize society.