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Arthur Machen’s 1933 novel, The Green Round, revisits a theme familiar to readers of his earlier work. An educated Londoner visits rural Wales and has an unsettling encounter that continues to haunt him – in this case, quite literally – after his return to the English capital. The novel’s protagonist, Lawrence Hillyer, retreats to a west Wales resort for the sake of his health, and is followed back to London by a malignant, troglodytic figure who invokes the evolutionary anxieties set forth in Machen’s earlier Little People stories, ‘The Shining Pyramid’ and the ‘Novel of the Black Seal’. Certainly, we might read Hillyer’s unsettling double as expressing the projection of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century evolutionary anxieties onto a colonised Other – a startling incursion of imperfectly civilised rural Welshness into the urban heart of England. However, as I argue here, nineteenth-century anxieties about the city as a site of degeneration are still at large in The Green Round, and Hillyer’s story is prefaced with a striking intrusion of the urban into the rural, complete with hints of racialised and class-coded atavism. The city itself becomes transformed into an Edenic paradise whose seductions pose as great a threat to Hillyer’s mental state as does his troglodytic companion, and which may in the end simply offer a more attractive route to degeneration. The appearance of the pre-human rural Other functions to expose the dual, or perhaps multiple, nature of the human city-dweller; its inability to escape its origins; its Other within.

‘The unknown region that lies beyond the Gray’s Inn Road’: Evolutionary Anxiety in the Country and the City in Arthur Machen's The Green Round