Winner of the 2003 National Book Critic’s Circle Award for Biography and the Royal Society of Literature’s W. M. Heinemann Prize 2003.
This concluding volume of Janet Browne’s magisterial biography covers the transformation in Darwin’s life after the first unexpected announcement of the theory of evolution by natural selection and the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. Always a private man, Darwin found himself a controversial figure, reviewed and discussed in circles that stretched far beyond the boundaries of Victorian science.
Janet Browne here examines the wider publishing world of Victorian England and the different audiences that responded to the ideas of one of the leading thinkers of the nineteenth century and considers the Darwinian revolution from Darwin’s point of view.