“Old things made new”: Transfusive rejuvenescence in M. E. Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne” and H. G. Wells’s “The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham”

Abstract

Abstract In 1897, congratulating Bram Stoker on the release of Dracula, the writer M. E. Braddon tries to establish precedence for herself by classifying the novel not, as we might expect, as a story of vampirism, but as one of “transfusion”. Taking this designation as its cue, this article recovers examples of what I term “transfusive rejuvenescence fiction”, in which a prolongation of life or restoration of youth is achieved via corporeal transferal. It contextualizes this sub-genre by charting how a revival of interest in blood transfusion’s rejuvenatory promise occurred alongside shifts in the attitudes to age and aging – to old age especially. Contrary to medical writers, who optimistically envisaged transfusion as an integral part of a “sentimental economy” – in which blood is donated out of “fellow-feeling” – transfusive rejuvenescence fiction raises the prospect of bloodborne youthfulness becoming commodified and circulating according to the tenets of the capitalist marketplace. In these fictions, transfusion serves as an evocative and versatile figure for expressing anxieties around the increasingly urgent question of provision for old age and the issues of intergenerational equity implied therein. To prove the argument, this article performs a comparative reading of Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne” and H. G. Wells’s “The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham”, both of 1896. The comparable but distinctive approaches taken by these two short stories means that examining them in tandem provides us with a fuller picture of the contributions that transfusive rejuvenescence fiction made to fin-de-siècle discourses of age and aging.