Inventing the Cave Man

Fred Flintstone may have lived in a sunny Stone Age American suburb, but his ancestors were respectable middle-class Victorians.

This book traces the cave man character in modern popular culture to its roots in Victorian London. Beginning with reactions to Darwinian ideas, the discovery of gorillas and the remains of ancient hominids in the 1850s, it shows how elite knowledge was continually reshaped and reimagined for mass audiences in cartoons, songs, sketches, plays and jokes. The first explicitly simian creatures evolved over time to become proto-human 'missing links', until the 1890s when cave men who inhabited an archaic version of nineteenth-century Britain emerged. This prehistoric world was used to send-up late-Victorian ideals and institutions, while simultaneously suggesting that they had existed from the beginning of time. The character spread throughout the empire and across the Atlantic at the turn of the century, where American cartoonists and filmmakers cemented it in global popular culture. Throughout, the history of cave men provides insights into ideas of gender, class, race and religion.

Making extensive and innovative use of digitised newspapers and magazines from throughout Britain, the empire and the United States, Inventing the cave man reveals the long-running popularity of comic prehistory in cartoons, magazines, music halls, songs and popular plays. It contributes significantly to our understanding of the Victorian turn of mind, tracing a forgotten aspect of British popular culture that remains visible in the twenty-first century.