Charles Darwin: A Biography, vol. 1 Voyaging, and: Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (review)

If the continued health of the “Darwin Industry” depends in part on the ability of scholars to make the insights of specialized research available to a wider audience, then the appearance of these two books is an auspicious symptom. Each in its own way does an excellent job of synthesizing the results of specialist studies in a form calculated to encourage the engagement of more general readers with its subject.

Any Darwin biographer must feel some trepidation about having something new to say on a subject so thoroughly studied. The ante is upped by dust-jacket claims that Browne’s will be the “definitive” biography when its second volume is completed. If fulfilled, these claims will rest not so much on a dramatically revised interpretation of the life, as on the scale and detail of this study and on the author’s skill in integrating the results of previous biographers and specialized Darwin scholarship into a widely accessible composite picture of the man as a product of his age. Browne’s thesis is that “Darwinism was made by Darwin and Victorian society” (p. xi). Disputing stereotypes of the reclusive and isolated genius, she sets out to demonstrate how he was “the product of a complex interweaving of personality and opportunity with the movements of the times” (p. xi). To this end she presents a detailed portrait of the private life of the young Darwin and projects it against a broadly sketched background of nineteenth-century social, political, and intellectual issues. Browne’s experience as associate editor of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin serves her well in making good use of letters and other archival documents to construct her portrait of the great scientist as son, brother, husband, and friend, as well as developing naturalist.

Browne’s goal of integrating social background into the life inevitably invites comparisons with the 1991 Darwin by James Moore and Adrian Desmond (London: Michael Joseph), with its controversial attempts to suggest affinities between the scientific and political revolutions of the day. More leisurely in her pace and more restrained in her tone, Browne focuses in greater depth on the sociological dimensions of knowledge production and professional identity during the period, providing numerous excursions into the state of scientific study in the early nineteenth century and offering sound explanations of what was at stake both socially and philosophically in the shaping intellectual issues of Darwin’s young manhood. To be sure, at times this context building seems too much like an end in itself: for instance, Browne spends several pages on the significance of extramural medical courses in Edinburgh (pp. 51–55), or on the spirit of university reform at Cambridge (pp. 92–94), only to admit that neither had any direct influence on Darwin himself. But at its best, her effort to trace the forces that shaped Darwin’s life and thought provides a satisfying corrective to conventional biographies that ignore the social production of even the greatest minds.

This is particularly true in her careful attention to Darwin’s class position and its influences on his life. She demonstrates the role of Darwin’s gentility (more important than his skills as a naturalist) in winning him a place on the Beagle voyage by detailing the “complex social procedure” (p. 149) that activated the “Cambridge Network” of gentleman intellectuals on his behalf and secured him his recommendation to Captain Robert FitzRoy. She likewise traces the crucial role of that network in preparing a place in the scientific community for him to step into upon his return (pp. 337, 368). Her analysis of Darwin’s rivalry with the Beagle’s surgeon, Robert McCormick, over which man would more successfully position himself as ship’s naturalist, unfolds a fascinating account of the “scientific commerce” (p. 207) in natural...