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 first single-volume biography of Charles Darwin in twenty-five years, A. N. Wilson, the acclaimed author of The Victorians and God’ s Funeral, goes in search of this celebrated but contradictory figure.
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, a brilliant naturalist, a patient and precise collector and curator who greatly expanded the possibilities of taxonomy and geology. On the other hand, a seemingly diffident man who appeared gentle and even lazy but hid a burning ambition to be a universal genius: he longed to have a theory that explained everything.
But was Darwin’ s 1859 masterwork, 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 selfishness and indifference to the poor were part of nature’ s grand plan?
Charles Darwin is a radical reappraisal of one of the great Victorians, a book that isn’ t afraid to challenge Darwinian orthodoxy while bringing us closer to the man, his revolutionary ideas, and the wider Victorian age.
