Introduction: Darwin and the Evolution of Victorian Studies

Fifty years ago, in just the third year of its own existence, Victorian Studies commemorated the centennial of On the Origin of Species with a special Darwin Anniversary Issue. An impressive interdisciplinary roster of scholars—including Morse Peckham, Bert James Loewenberg, Michael Passmore, and Cyril Bibby—weighed in on Darwin, Darwinism, and (in Peckham's famous term) Darwinisticism. Philip Appleman and Sydney Smith reviewed some of the early stirrings of what we now name the Darwin Industry, among them Gertrude Himmelfarb's Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959), Milton Millhauser's Just Before Darwin: Robert Chambers and Vestiges (1959), a new edition of the Origin introduced by Julian Huxley (1958), and a reprint of Francis Darwin's Life and Letters of his father, with a foreword by G. G. Simpson (1959).

As we mark the bicentennial of Darwin's birth and the sesquicentennial of his most famous publication, it's hard not to see the germs of much of the last half-century of Darwin studies in that Darwin Anniversary Issue. Highly regarded biologists like E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Jay Gould continued to introduce editions of the Origin and argue over Darwin's legacy for modern biology. In Himmelfarb's dismissal of Darwin and in Peckham's startled response to the anti-Darwinian vitriol of a caller to a radio program on which he was being interviewed, we can see the continuing cultural furor over evolution and its teaching, especially in America, that has itself elicited scholarly analysis. But it has been studies by historians and philosophers, grounded in a wealth of primary sources, of Darwin's life and work, and of the work of his precursors and contemporaries, that have distinguished the last half-century of scholarship on Darwin. Sydney Smith's "shock" at the realization that "there is still primary source material to be edited and published among the Darwin papers at Cambridge University Library" (110) surely gave way long ago to satisfaction, thanks in large measure to his own labors, at the sight—both in print and, increasingly, online—of Darwin's notebooks and correspondence (the latter sixteen volumes and counting). Biographies of Darwin, culminating in the magisterial two-volume study by Janet Browne, have flourished. The concern to appreciate Darwin's forerunners, rivals, resisters, and acolytes, and to understand and contextualize the transatlantic development, reception, and influence of his ideas, has led to such major pieces of scholarship as Michael Ghiselin's The Triumph of the Darwinian Method (1968); David Hull's Darwin and His Critics (1973); James Moore's The Post-Darwinian Controversies (1979); Michael Ruse's The Darwinian Revolution (1979); Dov Ospovat's The Development of Darwin's Theory (1981); Robert Young's Darwin's Metaphor (1985); Peter Bowler's The Non-Darwinian Revolution (1988); Adrian Desmond's The Politics of Evolution (1989); Robert Richards's The Meaning of Evolution (1992); Ronald Numbers's Darwinism Comes to America (1998); James Secord's Victorian Sensation (2000); and major biographical studies of figures like A. R. Wallace (by Martin Fichman), T. H. Huxley (by Desmond), and Richard Owen (by Nicolaas Rupke).

Harder to see in that earlier Victorian Studies special issue is a sign of the emerging (or perhaps more accurately, continuing) interest in Darwin by literary scholars. Of the issue's main contributors, only Peckham discusses literature, and then in fairly limited remarks on Hardy, Pater, Nietzsche, and Freud. Perhaps the problem was familiarity—after all, as Peckham noted in opening his essay, "Everyone knows that the impact of the Origin of Species was immense and that it has had a profound influence on the literature of England and of the West" (19). Peckham wished, in fact, to trouble this easy assertion, arguing for the difficulty of determining what influence was due to Darwin and what to Chambers, Lamarck, Spencer, or Huxley. Here, too, historians like Desmond and Secord are better seen as fulfilling Peckham's example and call. No, it is in another Darwinian publication of that era, Stanley Hyman's The Tangled Bank (1962), that we find the precursor of the revolutionary works of Darwinian literary...