Adrian Desmond - Darwin

PENGUIN BOOKS
DARWIN

Desmond and Moore have produced a tour de force which, like a good novel, invites the reader to press on from one chapter to the next. Pick it up and you are hooked, by the racy writing, the memorable turns of phrase, the historical insights and the sheer bravado of their performance William Bynum in the New Scientist

Their approach is brilliantly successful. Darwin is a rich, entertaining and always convincing portrait Stephen Young in the Guardian

A sprawling tome which combines scholarship with compulsive readability and goes right to the heart of the mystery of why Darwin hesitated so long before publishing his theory of evolution John Naughton in the Observer

The author of The Origin of Species deserves a major biography and Darwin fully matches the man David Owen in The Sunday Times

Certainly the most ambitious biography of Darwin yet seen The conflict between his intellectual daring and his need to live a life of intense respectability is the strange and terrible thing about Darwin, and it is rightly at the centre of this book Fiona McCarthy in The Times

An exhilarating biography and a social history of much of the nineteenth century. A full, fat work setting one of our indisputable men of genius in the fullest context Melvyn Bragg in The Sunday Times

Adrian Desmond studied at London University and Harvard, has higher degrees in vertebrate palaeontology and the history of science, and a Ph.D. for his work on Victorian evolution. He has written a companion volume to Darwin , a biography of Darwins bulldog Huxley (Penguin, 1997), which was voted by the New York Times one of the best books of the year. His other books include Archetypes and Ancestors (1982) and The Politics of Evolution (1989), which received the Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society in America. In 1993 the Society for the History of Natural History awarded him its Founders Medal. He is currently publishing (with Angela Darwin) a four volume edition of The T . H ., Huxley Family Correspondence . He is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Biology Department at University College London.

James Moore holds degrees in science, divinity and history, with a Ph.D. from Manchester University. He has studied Darwins life and times for thirty years. In The Post Darwinian Controversies (1979) he detailed Protestant responses to evolution, and his Darwin Legend (1994) analysed Darwins posthumous reputation. He has edited a source book, Religion in Victorian Britain (1988), and a series of essays, History, Humanity and Evolution (1989). Now Reader in History of Science and Technology at the Open University, he was Landon Clay Visiting Associate Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University in 1992-3, Visiting Messecar Professor of History at McMaster University in 1998, and Affiliated Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University in 1997-9. He is currently researching a biography of Alfred Russel Wallace.

Desmond and Moores Darwin won the 1991 James Tait Black Memorial Prize in Britain, the 1993 Comisso grand prize in Italy and the 1993 Watson Davis Prize from the History of Science Society in America. In 1997 the British Society for the History of Science awarded it the first Dingle Prize for the best book communicating the history of science to a wide audience.

ADRIAN DESMOND
AND
JAMES MOORE

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published by Michael Joseph 1991
Published in Penguin Books 1992
13

Copyright Adrian Desmond and James Moore, 1991
All rights reserved

The moral right of the authors has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193556-0

. Robert Darwin, Charless father. ( The Library, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London )

. The Mount, where Charles grew up. ( Order of the Proceedings at the Darwin Celebration held at Cambridge, 2224 June 1909. Cambridge U.P., 1909)

. Charles and his sister Catherine. ( James Moore )

. His Unitarian school. ( James Moore )

. Edinburgh University. ( The Library, University College London )

. Darwins Edinburgh mentor, Robert E. Grant. ( By courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London )

. The censored Plinian Society minutes. ( Edinburgh University Library )

. Christs College, Cambridge. ( Cambridgeshire Collection, Central Library, Cambridge )

. William Darwin Fox. ( Darwin Archive, by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library )

. Robert Taylor, the Devils Chaplain. ( National Portrait Gallery, London )

. Darwins home afloat, the Beagle. ( James Moore )

. The botanist John Stevens Henslow. ( University Archives, by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library )

. Fuegian savages. ( University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge )

. The devastated cathedral at Concepcin. (R. FitzRoy, Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majestys ShipsAdventureandBeagle . Vol. 2, Proceedings of the Second Expedition, 18311836. Colburn, 1839)

. Emma Wedgwood in 1839. ( James Moore )

. Macaw Cottage. (Greater London Record Office and History Library )

. Troops marching to Euston Station. ( Illustrated London News Picture Library )

. Charles and his son William in 1842. ( The Library, University College London )

. Darwins old study. ( Darwin Archive, by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library )

. Annie Darwin. ( Darwin Archive, by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library )

. Charless brother Erasmus. ( James Moore )

. Emma aged about fifty. ( Darwin Archive, by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library )

. The Revd John Brodie Innes, Darwins vicar. ( Kirsteen Mitcalfe, Milton Brodie, Forres, Scotland )

. Darwin in 1854. ( National Portrait Gallery, London )

. Joseph Hooker. ( National Portrait Gallery, London )

. Alfred Russel Wallace. ( James Moore