Product Description

In 1858, Charles Darwin was forty-nine years old, a gentleman scientist living quietly at Down House in the Kent countryside. He was not yet a focus of debate; his "big book on species" still lay on his desk as a manuscript. For more than twenty years he had been accumulating material for it, puzzling over the questions that it raised, trying to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion, and wanting to be certain that his startling theory of evolution was correct.

It is at this point that the concluding volume of Janet Browne's magisterial biography opens. Beginning with the extraordinary events that finally forced the Origin of Species into print, we come to the years of fame and controversy. Here, Browne does dramatic justice to all aspects of the Darwinian revolution, from a fascinating examination of the Victorian publishing scene to a survey of the debates between scientists and churchmen over evolutionary theory. At the same time, she presents a wonderfully sympathetic and authoritative picture of Darwin himself.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #27509 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 600 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780691114392
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
When Browne published her first volume on the life of Darwin seven years ago (Charles Darwin: Voyaging), she secured her reputation as the last word on the Victorian naturalist. Now she has published the much-anticipated second half, and it is more spellbinding than the first, which ended on a cliffhanger of sorts. Darwin was back from his Beagle voyages, his famous evolutionary principles were distilled in his mind and the Bible-centered science of his day was about to be convulsed forever. Here, Browne picks up the story a year before the publication of On the Origin of Species, with the arrival of a package from Alfred Russel Wallace, whose own ideas on natural selection virtually mirrored Darwin's, forcing him to go public; as Browne shows, he proved himself a master tactician of institutional and media spin. Browne's subject is monumental, but her writing style is never overburdened by the weight. Rather, her prose is elegant in its clarity of thought, her craftsmanship impeccable in the way it weaves a coherent whole from the innumerable threads of thought, experience and persona that comprised this colossal life. Darwin's science, Browne contends, was characterized by his systematic use of correspondence, which the author puts to effective use in her narrative, again illustrating how the naturalist's thought was as much the collective product of his day as it was its single-most intellectual catalyst. Readers are left with the image of the sailor returned home to dig in his garden, stare into the past and, in dying, slip into legend.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This volume concludes a magisterial biography. The first volume, Charles Darwin: Voyaging, examined how the young Darwin formed his ideas. Now Browne, a zoologist and historian of science, offers a frank, comprehensive, and detailed account of the last half of Darwin's life (l858-82), focusing on both his major contributions to natural history and his pioneering researches into many biological subjects, ranging from orchids and insectivorous plants to the inheritance of characteristics and earthworms. She stresses the serious scientific and theological controversies that surrounded the publication of On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (l871) and emphasizes the great value Darwin found in his relationships with like-minded naturalists such as Charles Lyell, Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley, and Alfred Wallace. Besides all the facts, ideas, and events, the reader also discovers the human side of the scientific father of organic evolution. Of special interest is Browne's attention to Darwin's quiet family life at Down House, including insights into his voluminous correspondence and debilitating ill health. In this very impressive volume, Darwin emerges as a modest and private genius consumed with the need to understand the complexities of life forms through critical observation and persistent experimentation. Highly recommended for all academic and public science collections. H. James Birx, Canisius Coll., Buffalo, NY
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Scientific American
After years of immersion in Charles Darwin's 14,000 letters at the Cambridge Library, Janet Browne--an editor of the Darwin correspondence project--has published the second half of her sprawling, magnificent biography. Integrating the best of current scholarship with her own discoveries, Browne's account is state of the art. That said, as Stephen Jay Gould once opined, too many Darwins dwelled within this enormously complex man to allow any one biography to be definitive. But if the most any author can do is to find his or her own Darwin, Browne's finely detailed portrait ranks among the best ever attempted. Voyaging, her first volume, published in 1995, followed the young naturalist through his adventures on board HMS Beagle, his return home and his marriage to his cousin Emma Wedgwood. While still on the ship, in 1835, Charles had written his sister that he'd had enough seafaring. I am convinced it is a most ridiculous thing to go round the world, he wrote, when by staying quietly, the world will go round with you. That seemingly casual comment turned out to be his plan for life. After purchasing a comfortable home in the rural outskirts of London, the Darwins settled in to raise seven children, assisted by a staff of maids, cooks and gardeners. Little by little, Darwin transformed Down House into a self-contained biological field station, a stationary Beagle trawling for facts. It became headquarters for fomenting, in Darwin's words, a considerable revolution in natural history, the site of a coordinated family effort, the focus of a worldwide correspondence and the hub of a social network that reached deep into London's scientific community. Browne's latest volume picks up the story in the late 1850s, with events leading up to publication of On the Origin of Species. We've become familiar with the modest, reticent, semi-invalided Victorian gentleman who ceaselessly badgered correspondents for seeds, skins and field observations when he wasn't pottering among his pigeons, earthworms and carnivorous plants. But Browne offers surprising details about another Darwin--a remarkable tactician ... a canny and dedicated publicist. Darwin well understood that posterity does not necessarily remember the discoverer of an idea but the individual who first convinces the world of its truth. Browne shows a Darwin obsessed over details of publishing, timing, choosing the right translators for foreign editions and closely monitoring book sales. While his lieutenants Thomas Huxley and Joseph Hooker promoted evolution within scientific circles, Darwin kept an eye on how he was faring with the general public. He clipped, catalogued and indexed hundreds of offprints, about 350 reviews and 1,600 articles, as well as satires, parodies and Punch caricatures, with which he filled hefty scrapbooks--a seemingly incongruous activity for a self-effacing sage. He remarked, I am really quite sick of myself. Browne also provides new and welcome details about Darwin as a pigeon breeder, botanist and crusader against spiritualist con men who drew members of his family into séances. His interest in varieties of domestic fruits, she notes, led him to raise 57 kinds of gooseberries! As for Darwin's mysterious malady, Browne oddly dismisses any attempt to diagnose his illness at such a distance as surely impossible and considers Chagas' disease or any latent tropical infection picked up during the Beagle voyage as unlikely, without offering her reasons. While in Argentina, Darwin was bitten by the Benchuca bug (the great black bug of the Pampas), which is now known to often carry the Chagas' blood parasite in its feces. Darwin's chronicling of the invasive contact, along with his symptoms--40 years of flatulence, vomiting, weakness and fatigue--are entirely consistent with a diagnosis of chronic (arrested) Chagas' disease. His doctors were baffled, because the connections between the stomach pathology, the insect bite and the insidious trypanosome were not known to medicine until almost three decades after Darwin's death. In addition, historian and psychiatrist Ralph Colp, Jr., has correlated some of Darwin's worst attacks with psychosomatic stress. Colp demonstrated years ago that Darwin suffered many of the most severe bouts of illness whenever his work or his theory was attacked in print. In 1863, for instance, just after his geological mentor Charles Lyell published an infuriatingly tepid endorsement of evolution in his Antiquity of Man, Darwin's disappointment brought on 10 days of vomiting, faintness and stomach distress. (He then canceled a long-planned visit by Lyell to Down House.) Similarly, in 1871, anatomist St. George Mivart's scathing attack on The Descent of Man triggered two months of giddiness and inability to work--part of a striking and recurrent pattern that Browne inexplicably ignores. That lapse aside, however, this marvelous book is indispensable for anyone seeking to understand the man (and the crucial role played by his family and friends) as he revolutionized Western thought about human nature and origins. Browne has appropriately titled her concluding volume The Power of Place. Even present-day visitors to Down House are often struck by how the house and grounds still seem to bear the impress of Darwin's powerful personality. She invites the reader to enjoy extended and enlightening visits with the Darwins and their friends. The best part is that whenever you want to drop in, they are always home.

Richard Milner wrote The Encyclopedia of Evolution and the one-man musical Charles Darwin: Live & in Concert.

Customer Reviews

A Wonderful Life
Well, this is volume II of a magnificent two-volume biography. In its patient, sympathetic and intelligent rendering it exemplifies those qualities in Darwin himself. Moreover, this is truly the second volume. One could read this without having read "Voyaging" and make sense of it, but Darwin and his world would be less fleshed-out, he and his friends would not be old friends of yours, and the story, which is nothing less than a whole life well-lived (but not, be it noted, perfectly-lived), the less thereby. And what is more, the Darwin-Wedgewood genealogy is not reproduced here - you need volume I for that.

Darwin, for someone of such stature socially and scientifically, was a rooted, private man. He rarely left his spacious, gated home at Down except to visit one of his few good friends or relatives. His public appearances were nearly as noted as the Pope's. In spite of this seeming exclusiveness, he maintained an immense and warm correspondence all over the world. Alfred Russell Wallace, for example, was one of his good friends, but almost entirely by means of letters. Moreover, he received a constant stream of visitors at Down, many of whom were hardly known to him, and some of whom barely spoke English.

However, these visits were rarely extended beyond a courteous lunch. Darwin would often plead weakness or illness (or let one of the womenfolk do it for him) in order to get away to his study and his studies after being dutifully social. Of course, if it was Huxley, or Lyell, or Hooker visiting, then Darwin had considerably more strength for conversation. These old friends formed the core of his scientific network, and, along with Asa Gray in America, were his representatives in the larger scientific world.

The story of Charles Darwin is the story of a homebody: he did most of his experiments with jury-rigged apparatus in his house, garden, or greenhouse, using his children as assistants, and begging and borrowing plant and animal material from his friends and correspondents all around the world, without himself going anywhere. It is the story of a man who loved his wife, and needed her, for he was always "poorly", and he was always busy. It is the story of a man who was warm and affectionate, and constantly a-tingle with some absorbing project in natural history. Yet it is the story of a supremely absorbed man, who was as totally selfish in his dedication to his obsessions as any artist, ruthlessly (but charmingly) using the people around him and around the world to further his investigations, and shield him from those social duties that soak up so much of the lives of most of us.

Janet Browne gently disapproves of Darwin's selfishness, which was consistent and on at least two occasions (when he refused to go to the funerals of old friends who had helped him tremendously) nearly unforgiveable. Yet she clearly liked the man, as did almost everyone who knew him (including some of his ideological opponents). He preserved himself for his work, it is true, but he still understood the obligations of a Victorian gentleman of means. He was active in the village life at Down, using his money and time to promote worthy causes of benefit to the poorer residents. He also had a soft spot for animals, and spent much energy opposing unthinking cruelty to beasts whenever he encountered it. He also was the prime mover behind getting a government pension for Alfred Russel Wallace, who had fallen on hard times, as well as many other quiet gifts to science, and to individuals.

On balance, Darwin was a tremendously appealing man, and his life, personal and scientific (which were totally intertwined, both domestically and socially) a model of Victorian striving. Prudent and successful in investing his money, an obsessive list-maker and careful household manager, and a famously hard worker in his science, he came by his success, as he felt, honestly. But to me the appeal of this book lies in its location in Darwin's domestic and social milieu. This also happened to be his scientific milieu, for most of his friends, and some of his relatives, were scientists whose interests overlapped with his own.

This book picks up the story in 1858, when Darwin got a letter from a man known to him only as a collector, Alfred Russel Wallace. He was stunned to see that his pet theory of speciation by natural selection had occurred to Wallace during his sojourn in the jungles of the East. The cat was out of the bag, so Darwin thought he might as well write down what he knew, including his researches during the previous twenty years into the topic. This book just grew and grew, and finally became "The Origin of Species"; the main narrative thread of Darwin's later life is, of course, the fate of this "child". After 1859 he was suddenly a household name, and a fit subject for political cartoons and pulpitical denunciations. Within a few years "Darwinism" was a noun in general use. He himself spent tremendous energy in surreptitious efforts to get his theory accepted, and did not scruple to let his friends, like Huxley, savage his enemies, like Owen.

Janet Browne gives this story its due. As always, her mastery of the material is complete, and she tells a complicated story gracefully. But more than this, she is attuned to the sociology of the situation. She understands how scientific ideas gain acceptance, as well as how the nascent industry of popular publishing contributed to the success of Darwin's ideas among the larger public. One of the recurring pleasures of this book is to enjoy her observations on the social issues that impinge on this life story.

Further, it is a measure of her almost novelistic skill that our attitude toward Darwin's life changes almost insensibly: though we may have come to his story because we were curious about an idea, we are sad to see it end because we have come to care about the man himself.

The Best Biography of Darwin, part 2.
As several reviewers (including at least one critic of Darwin) have said, this volume is part of the best biography of Darwin yet published. It is hard to criticize this work as Janet Browne has included more detail and hit the nail on the head more times than in any other treatment of Darwin and his ideas. I have read five biographies, several specialized biographies and Darwin's autobiography and can easily say that this by far the best! Browne is simply superb in capturing the spirit of Victorian England and weaving it into a cogent story of the background and inspiration for "The Origin of Species," as well as Darwin's latter work. This volume covers the period from the receipt of Wallace's manuscript on natural selection through Darwin's death. It finally puts paid to the popular notion that Darwin stole his ideas from Wallace, without slighting the originality of the younger man. Darwin was a great thinker, not because he was unusually brilliant, but because he concentrated his thinking on a problem until he came up with a plausible explanation backed up by numerous bits of circumstantial evidence. While many changes have occurred in evolutionary thought because of the genetic and molecular revolutions, Darwin produced the most complete arguments for the common descent of organisms available to science at the time. He thus laid the foundation of our understanding of modern biology. This is true despite opinions to the contrary and, indeed, without evolutionary theory we would have to say goodbye to rigor in not only biology, but geology and astronomy as well!

It is my hope that anybody interested in the historical background of evolutionary theory will read both of Browne's books. They are well worth it!

Gentleman, gardener, genius, human . . .
Charles Darwin's "place" in history is secure. The concept of evolution by natural selection was "the single best idea anyone has ever had," as Daniel C. Dennett so aptly put it. Although the idea seems simple, Browne establishes that the man who conceived it was anything but that. In taking two substantial volumes to depict Darwin's life, Browne reveals the complexity and control hidden beneath his serene outward demeanor. For many years, Darwin's seclusion at Down House left the impression of the retired, retiring scientific thinker. On the contrary, Browne shows "a remarkable tactician" manipulating friends,
colleagues and, in the final analysis, society at large. This compelling study is the outstanding work on Darwin. Her focus on his motivations, activities and other aspects of what made him such a towering figure makes this a remarkable work. This magnificent study and its companion "Voyaging" will maintain their value as Darwin's pre-eminent account for many years.

The pivotal point, of course, is Darwin's 1859 book, The Origin of Species. Browne recounts the "Wallace letter" which nearly toppled Darwin from the place of priority in developing the idea of natural selection. Darwin's friends and colleagues rallied to sustain him while maintaining fairness to both him and Wallace. The many years of study Darwin had given to the concept resulted in the volume that changed our view of life, but it remains an open question whether he would have published without the "thunderbolt from Ternate." Browne's view isn't narrow, however, as she places Origin within the broader schema of Victorian writing, whether fiction, social commentary, poetry or science.

Browne leads us through the years of turmoil following publication of Origin. Strangely, she notes, the chief objectors were fellow scientists, not the religious establishment. Even the British Association debate, often considered the pivot point for making the public aware of the book's meaning, brought out a churchman who had been prompted by one of Darwin's scientific peers. Although Darwin remained at Down throughout the ensuing years, he maintained constant control of those who spoke for him. He reached Continental readers quickly, although troubled by freely editing translators.

This account portrays Darwin's "place" by almost every definition of the term. Browne shows Darwin's status among his colleagues, depicts him as a teacher, a father, a member of his community, both locally and in the grander Victorian Era setting. Darwin was a man of his class, most of which endorsed thinking and speculation. Most importantly, she shows his stature as a human, at times fearful, courageous, withdrawing, helpful to his friends and scornful of his enemies. He counseled his children, or used them for help, as the moment demanded. He sought to protect his wife, but Browne makes clear Emma was under few illusions of the meaning of natural selection. Darwin was no hypocrite, but was long in reaching his final dismissal of deities. Whatever the enduring nature of his idea, the man, Browne asserts, still remained a mortal figure.

Beyond Origin, Browne relates Darwin's conflicting feelings leading to later works - Descent of Man, plant domestication, orchids, emotional expression and the obscure world of earthworms. Many of these publications would later prove fundamentally supportive of natural selection. All required immense amounts of study, communication and writing. He tended his own plants, studied earthworms at night and used the new technology of phototgraphy. The variation in topics and methods reflects once again Darwin's genius, but even more his strengths as a naturalist. Little escaped his scrutiny and he was able to impart his findings with flowing prose reaching a wide public. All these accomplishments were achieved in spite of frequent illnesses, none of which were successfully treated.

We owe much to Darwin, and Browne has discharged a significant portion of the debt with this book. The labour of many years, it's an elegant portrayal, worthy of the effort so evident in its making. Whatever your interests, sit down with this book and meet the man Browne has re-introduced to us. It will be a rewarding experience. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]