Charles Darwin and the Victorian Pre-History of Climate Denial

Recent theorists of the response to anthropogenic climate change have focused on what Naomi Klein terms “soft denial”: the tendency to accept the scientific consensus while continuing to live as if it were not true. This essay contends that this divided state of mind can be tracked back to the nineteenth century: specifically, in the response to the new biological paradigm articulated most cogently by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species (1859). In what follows, I discuss this tension in relation to Victorian evolutionary discourse and in a number of key literary works of the period, including Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) and Idylls of the King (1859–85), H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899).