Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker

Summary (from the publisher): Charles Darwin: the man who discovered evolution? The man who killed off God? Or a flawed man of his age, part genius, part ruthless careerist who would not acknowledge his debts to other thinkers?

In this bold new life - the first single volume biography in twenty-five years - A. N. Wilson, the acclaimed author of The Victorians and God's Funeral, goes in search of the celebrated but contradictory figure Charles Darwin.

Darwin was described by his friend and champion, Thomas Huxley, as a 'symbol'. But what did he symbolize? In Wilson's portrait, both sympathetic and critical, Darwin was two men. On the one hand, he was a naturalist of genius, a patient and precise collector and curator who greatly expanded the possibilities of taxonomy and geology. On the other hand, Darwin, a seemingly diffident man who appeared gentle and even lazy, hid a burning ambition to be a universal genius. He longed to have a theory which explained everything.

But was Darwin's 1859 master work, On the Origin of Species, really what it seemed, a work about natural history? Or was it in fact a consolation myth for the Victorian middle classes, reassuring them that the selfishness and indifference to the poor were part of nature's grand plan?

Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker is a radical reappraisal of one of the great Victorians, a book which isn't afraid to challenge the Darwinian orthodoxy while bringing us closer to the man, his revolutionary idea and the wider Victorian age.

 

Review: I received an uncorrected proof copy of this book from HarperCollins.

 

Charles Darwin was born in 1809 the son of a prosperous doctor turned banker. His grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin "was not merely a sought-after physician. He was also an inventor. Addicted to ever-faster travel, he invented a steering mechanism for his phaeton which, in essence, still used in motorcars" (22). But not only was he a "medical, technological, and scientific prodigy," he was also arguably the most famous poet in England (23). Charles' mother Sukey was the oldest daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, the millionaire known for the pottery that still bears his name. Thus not only did Darwin come by his lifelong pursuits naturally, but he had the means that made it possible for him to do so.

 

Wilson argues that Darwin had three great preoccupations; one was a passion for the natural world, another dependency on his family (he married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, and largely only socialized with family), and the third was to promote his own name and greatness. Wilson makes it clear that throughout his life, Darwin had a habit of downplaying or entirely omitting the contributions of colleagues and forebears in order to represent himself as "the pioneer evolutionist" (52). Wilson argues that Darwin had a "genius for self-promotion" (147).

 

Perhaps most surprising to me, a newcomer to the life of Darwin, was how little of his life was actually spent in the wild. He spent five years exploring the world and collecting specimens. The remainder of his life was spent largely closeted with his wife and children and working and writing on the finds from that trip. In fact, he was a sickly man throughout life and was often in bed with some illness or other. Another shock was reading that the famous finches, whose differences among the Galapagos islands figures strongly in any discussion of Darwin's theory of evolution, was not even mentioned in The Origin of Species. In fact, it was ornithologist John Gould who noted the differences in the finches. Also interesting was Darwin's denial that he had ever read his grandfather's writing that asserted that all life originated "from non-life in the ocean bed" (57), a denial that served to enhance his status as sole father of evolutionary theory. In sum, Darwin was indeed excellent at promoting the myth of his own greatness, the legacy of which is still distorted and made much grander than reality today.

 

In writing this biography, Wilson argues that he is writing "the biography not merely of a man, but of his idea" (6). Darwin spent years fleshing out and revising his theory on evolution. "It will always be hard to know which caused him the greater anxiety: the fear that his theory might be true - thereby dismissing the God of the Bible, perhaps any God - or the fear that it might be false - thereby diminishing him from the status of greatest scientific mind of the nineteenth century" (187).

 

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