This chapter develops the topic of blood as a figure of species identity in readings of late Victorian anthropological writing on totemism and on blood brotherhood. The totem, according to its first theorist, is always a species, and totemism is a theory of species identity. Besides anthropology, the chapter discusses Kipling’s Jungle Book and Stoker’s Dracula. It closes with a return to Freud, to the species concept in psychoanalysis, and to species identity as constituted by diet.

This chapter is the first of two on blood as a figure for kinship and species identity in the nineteenth century. It begins with the history of bloodletting and blood transfusion in the period, and documents the emergence in the second half of the century of an imaginary species body, whose individual members are characterized by their propensity to save or waste blood from the common supply. The idea of a collective body sharing a common blood is traced in a series of texts on bloodshed and blushing, including Alfred Tennyson’s “Maud,” William Morris’s “The Defense of Guinevere,” Christina Rossetti’s “The Convent Threshold,” D. G. Rossetti’s “Jenny,” and Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

This chapter, the second of two chapters focusing on the nineteenth-century prosthetic imagination, suggests that the Gothic tradition offers another way of thinking about the dead hand. It reads dead-handedness, or mortmain, as it runs through the Gothic novel of the period, from Shelley to Poe to Stoker, Stevenson and Wilde, to suggest that the Gothic offers an undertow to the work of the realist novel in transforming dead flesh into living being. The Gothic works against the realist novel, in is refusal of the animating work of narrative; but as the chapter reads this opposition, it suggests a shared investment, in both the realist and the Gothic traditions, in the tension between dead and living material, under the conditions produced by industrialisation, and by emerging information technologies.