With increasing urbanization, upheavals in the previous social structure have occurred. As the crime rate of the lower classes increased, many characters began to fit the degenerate types identified by Lankester and Freud. European travel and colonialism lead to the discovery of what were considered “primitive” peoples to be compared and contrasted. This led to an awareness of the fragility of Western culture and civilization. Several books and articles began to “document” the deterioration of the human condition, such as Morel's Treatise on Degeneration and Gobineau's Eassy on the Inequality of Human Races. The distressing conditions of the working class and centralized urban environments in London provided ample basis for writing many fictional stories about the degeneration of man. The Strange Case of Dr. Jeykll and Mr. Hyde plays on this fear as does Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. The novels and essays of the era draw their strength from the tumultuous transition to the industrial age combined with the anxieties the British Empire was facing about the future. The discovery of various cultures and colonization/globalization may also have played a role in the growing fear of degeneration. This could have led many English people to realize that they are simply not the center of the world and the fragility of Western civilization. In A Companion to the Victorian Novel by