CHARLES DARWIN

Continuing where Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995) left off, the British science historian completes her brilliant two-volume biography.

The narrative opens in 1858, when Darwin received a letter posted by Alfred Russel Wallace from a faraway Indonesian island. Though it reinforced Darwin’s long-held (but unpublished) evolutionary views, the letter destroyed any hope that he was the sole originator of those ideas. The shock prompted the writing and reluctant publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, but Darwin shouldn’t have been surprised, writes Browne (History of Biology/Wellcome Inst., London). Anticipations of natural selection and speciation abounded in contemporary scientific literature; he had simply “closed his mind to the possibility that other thinkers might be moving along the same road as he and that any one of them might come up with the same answer.” To his credit, Darwin accommodated the views of Wallace and others, which had the effect of unifying disparate parties in what amounted to a scientific revolution. At a time of unfettered empire, aggressively expanding markets, and “carboniferous capitalism,” Darwin’s exploration of the struggle for survival and the necessity of adaptation seemed very apt, even though it overturned Victorians’ notions that nature “mirrored the social stability they thought they saw around them.” On the contrary, Darwin quietly insisted, the world had no moral purpose or validity. He himself was not inclined to rely on fate, Brown demonstrates: for all his apparent desire to be left alone to lead the life of a country gentleman, Darwin was a shrewd self-promoter, vigorously publicizing his work even in the depths of a long illness that she suggests may have been brought on in part by his tireless labors. An overlooked magazine questionnaire from 1874 reveals that he considered himself something of a failure except as a businessman.

A richly detailed, vivid, and definitive portrait with not a word wasted: the best life of Charles Darwin in the modern literature.