LITERARY HISTORIES OF THE NATURAL HISTORICAL BOOK

Inspired in part by the coincident bicentenary of Darwin's birth and the sesquicentennial of The Origin of Species in 2009, scholars have been hard at work these last ten years writing substantial histories of nineteenth-century natural history and geology. These histories include exceptional books by scholars trained primarily in literary studies: Cannon Schmitt's Darwin and the Memory of the Human (2009); Daniel Brown's The Poetry of Victorian Scientists (2013); and Gowan Dawson's Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (2007). With a few notable exceptions, however, the books I was invited to review here are written mostly by historians of science. And yet they are no less literary for that. All are marked by a tacit, pragmatic adoption of actor-network theory; by the extraordinary resources of the Darwin Correspondence Project and online databases of British periodicals; and often, too, by glossy illustrations. Further, nearly all of these histories share a methodological investment in what we call the history of the book, including all the economics of publishing (formats, sizes, fonts, prices, print runs, reviews, sales, generic conventions) and a political and heuristic stake in popularization and the general reading public. While Darwin (and Lyell, Herschel, Hooker, Huxley, and Spencer) remain at the center of the discussion, the empirically-minded history-of-the-book approach and investment in everyday readers reconstructs and legitimates a robust popular science that was engaged with, but not subordinate to, and often more liberal than the elite science of the X Club, the Royal Society, and other exclusive institutions. With the help of museums, lectures, tour guides, and other natural scientific literature, everyday readers produced their own knowledge of evolution, stratigraphy, speciation, animal emotion, and the sex life of plants.

Evolutionary Writings

‘Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.’ On topics ranging from intelligent design and climate change to the politics of gender and race, the evolutionary writings of Charles Darwin occupy a pivotal position in contemporary public debate. This volume brings together the key chapters of his most important and accessible books, including the Journal of Researches on the Beagle voyage (1845), the Origin of Species (1871), and the Descent of Man, along with the full text of his delightful autobiography. They are accompanied by generous selections of responses from Darwin’s nineteenth-century readers from across the world. More than anything, they give a keen sense of the controversial nature of Darwin’s ideas, and his position within Victorian debates about man’s place in nature. The wide-ranging introduction by James A. Secord, Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project, explores the global impact and origins of Darwin’s work and the reasons for its unparalleled significance today.

The evolution of a theory

Janet Browne, Charles Darwin Voyaging . Volume 1 of a Biography. Jonathan Cape, London, 1995. Pp. xiii + 605, 86 illustrations and maps, £25. ISBN 0 224 04202 5 A new era has opened for biographers of Charles Darwin with the prospective availability of the whole of his extant correspondence, meticulously edited by the members of the Darwin Correspondence Project at the Cambridge University Library, set up in 1975 by Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith. Nine volumes have been published so far, covering the years from 1821 to 1861, and the remaining 10,000 letters listed in A Calendar of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin are planned to follow in future volumes at intervals of about 10 months. Janet Browne, as one of the original Assistant Editors of the Project, was in a good position to take advantage of the hitherto untapped evidence in many of Darwin’s personal and scientific letters, and has made very effective use of it in writing the first instalment of a biography that covers the initial development of his thinking about evolution in a much more satisfactory fashion than any of its predecessors.