What do classic novels like Count Dracula, Middlemarch and Pride and Prejudice have in common? They all contributed to upholding the social order and made people more altruistic across Victorian society, says an analysis by evolutionary psychologists.

A team of evolutionary psychologists, spearheaded by Joseph Carroll at the University of Missouri in St Louis applied Darwin's theory of evolution to literature, asking 500 academicians to answer questionnaires on characters from 201 classic Victorian novels. Respondents were asked to define characters as protagonists or antagonists, rate their personality traits, and comment on their emotional response to the characters.

Their analysis puts forth that classic British novels from the 19th century reflect the values of Victorian society, and even helped shape them, as they laud the virtues of an egalitarian society, and pit traditional adversaries, cooperation and affability against individualistic power-hungry dominance.

In George Eliot's Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke chooses helping the poor while turning her back on wealth. Bram Stoker's Count Dracula personified the worst excesses of aristocratic dominance.

The researchers say leading characters fell of the novels fall into groups that mirror the cooperative nature of a hunter-gatherer society, where individual urges for power and wealth are suppressed for the good of the community. This upheld a sense of fairness and altruism in society at large, they say in the journal Evolutionary Psychology.

"By enforcing these norms, humans succeed in controlling 'free riders' or 'cheaters' and they thus make it possible for genuinely altruistic genes to survive within a social group.".

Christopher Boehm is a cultural anthropologist at the Unversity of Southern California, while Jonathan Gottschall is a co-author at Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania. The New Scientist magazine quoted Gottschall as saying that in Victorian novels, dominant behaviour was stigmatised, but as a group evolved towards cooperation, the chances of its survival and spreading its values improved.

Moreover, with a few characters judged to possess both good and bad traits demonstrate conflicts that show the strain of maintaining such a cooperative social order. These are exemplified by Heathcliff in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Jane Austen's Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.

Other characters were more black a white, such as Stoker's Dracula who represented the noble aristocracy at its most brutal. The researchers say that these novels have the same impact on society as cautionary tales of old, which were handed down by word of mouth.

Dr Carroll was quoted as saying that though few in today's world live in hunter-gatherer societies, the political dynamic at work in the classic novels showcase a universal theme of the opposition between communitarianism and dominance behaviour.

Believing that the novels act as "social glue" the researchers say they provide important instruction on how society should behave, in particular reinforcing the beliefs that maintain the community and warn against destructive influences and character traits. Gottschall was quoted as saying that good literature conditions society to help it right core impulses and promote working in a cooperative way.

For their research, 500 people filled in a questionnaire about 200 classic Victorian novels, defining characters in the novels according to their traits.
Reports quoted Gottschall as summing up the findings succinctly, saying "Maybe storytelling – from TV to folk tales – actually serves some specific evolutionary function. They're not just by-products of evolutionary adaptation."

Apparently, storytelling endures across time and cultures, on account of its contribution to our evolutionary roots.