On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859)
Darwin’s revolutionary, humane and highly readable introduction to his theory of evolution is arguably the most important book of the Victorian era
A review by Robert McCrum
When Charles Darwin first saw On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life in book form, he is said to have remarked that he found it tough going. Actually, the book, composed in a hurry to forestall his rivals, after 20 years of research, and aimed at that mythical beast “the educated general reader”, is extraordinarily accessible, sometimes even moving, in its lucid simplicity. That’s all the more remarkable for a revolutionary work of scientific theory, arguably the most important book published in the English language during the 19th century.
From a 21st-century perspective, Darwin’s Origin has two roles in this list. First, it is a profoundly influential work of biology, argued in astonishing, and compelling detail. For example, one famous passage (too long to quote in full) describes the ecological benefits to “a large and extremely barren heath” derived from the planting of Scotch fir: “I went to several points of view, whence I could examine hundreds of acres of the unenclosed heath, and literally I could not see a single Scotch fir, except the old planted clumps. But on looking closely between the stems of the heath, I found a multitude of seedlings and little trees, which had been perpetually browsed down by the cattle. In one square yard … I counted 32 little trees; and one of them, judging from the rings of growth, had during 26 years tried to raise its head above the stems of the heath, and had failed. No wonder that, as soon as the land was enclosed, it became thickly clothed with vigorously growing young firs.” [pp 123-24]
Second, The Origin of Species was also a controversial and popular title that caught the imagination of the mid-Victorian public, transformed attitudes to Christianity and the human race, and would become a source book for generations of capitalists, communists and, ultimately, the Nazis. As the author of radical thought, grounded in profound observation, Darwin was described as “the most dangerous man in England”, whose account of natural selection challenged the “truth” of the Bible, the automatic authority of God in nature, and the privileged position of the human animal at the centre of creation.
Darwin’s plan had always been to write a much longer book about the vulnerability of the species. When his friend and colleague Alfred Russel Wallace sent him a paper setting out the theory of natural selection, an idea inspired by a reading of Thomas Malthus on population growth, Darwin was immediately provoked into getting a lifetime of work and speculation into print before any rival established a competitive version.
As it turned out, Darwin had no need to worry. Although John Murray, his publisher, was unsure about the market, and initially printed just 1,250 copies, this edition (now incredibly rare) sold out on the first day. The question of survival in Victorian society was highly topical, and Darwin’s account of natural selection caught the public mood. He himself was quite tentative about his new theory, and always stressed the length of time involved in the process of species adaptation: “Its action depends on there being places in the polity of nature, which can be better occupied by some of the inhabitants of the country undergoing modification of some kind … The action of natural selection will probably still oftener depend on some of the inhabitants becoming slowly modified; the mutual relations of many of the other habitants being thus disturbed.”
Darwin goes on: “Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring … I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man’s power of selection.”
As many critics have noted, The Origin is a polemical book written in a mild, sometimes defensive, and uncontentious way by a passionate, lifelong naturalist with a deep reverence for nature. Darwin’s dithyrambic conclusion is celebrated: “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us … Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
This is a side of The Origin rooted in Darwin’s love of the English countryside. In Victorian society, there were many harsher aspects. For Marx and Engels, Darwinism was the biological equivalent of class war. For some Americans, such as Andrew Carnegie and Teddy Roosevelt, his ideas explained the dynamics of capitalism. To the imperial powers who were drifting towards war in the 1900s, war – some said – was a “biological necessity”. Many of Darwin’s apologists have given his ideas a bad name. But, at its humane and deeply reflective heart, this pioneering book is a secular hymn to the countryside, the place in which Darwin himself was always happiest.
A signature sentence
“What a struggle between the several kinds of trees must here have gone on during long centuries, each annually scattering its seeds by the thousand; what war between insect and insect – between insects, snails, and other animals with birds and beasts of prey – all striving to increase, and all feeding on each other or on the trees or their seeds and seedlings, or on the other plants which first clothed the ground and thus checked the growth of the trees!”
