An essay on the question of how species develop; published in London in 1859.
by Charles Darwin
Synopsis
Positing a mechanism called "natural selection" for the evolution of new species from old. On the Origin of Species accounts for the presence of every species on earth through two simple principles: variation and selection.
The Essay in Focus
Events in History at the Time of the Essay
The most influential scientific writer of the nineteenth century, Charles Robert Darwin (1809–82) sought a quiet life in rural Kent, where he was nonetheless plagued by gastrointestinal troubles, likely due to a tropical disease but undoubtedly exacerbated by worry. Charles was born to a wealthy Whig family, who had, after a couple of generations of vocal liberalism and Unitarian dissent, settled down into "Anglican respectability" (Desmond and Moore p. 19). Infinitely more interested in natural history than medicine (for which his family originally sent him to the University of Edinburgh) or divinity (for which he read at Cambridge University), Darwin put other pursuits on hold and accepted the post of naturalist and companion to Captain Fitzroy of the HMS Beagle. The voyage was decisive. Darwin spent five years on the Beagle (1831–36), exploring the world and gathering enough material to keep him busy for decades to come. Darwin's books enjoyed tremendous success. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), together with its predecessor On the Origin of Species, is considered the keystone of Darwin's work. Even his first book, which we now know as The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), was a dazzling success. But it took Darwin 20 years, after becoming convinced of the truth of its central ideas, to publish On the Origin of Species. He was fully sensitive to the potentially disturbing nature of his own work and to the social and familial upheavals it would ferment. Only the independent discovery of natural selection by another naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, finally drove Darwin to publish "the book that shook the world" (Mayr, p. vii).
For More Information
Beer, Gillian. "Introduction." The Origin of Species.2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
_____. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Ark, 1985.
Dale, Peter Allen. In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. A facsimile of the first edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Desmond, Adrian, and James Moore. Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist. New York: Norton, 1991.
Levine, George. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Lightman, Bernard, ed. Victorian Science in Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Mayr, Ernst. "Introduction." On the Origin of Species. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Ruse, Michael. The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
Tennyson, Alfred. In Memoriam. Ed. Robert H. Ross. New York: Norton, 1973.
Literature and Its Times © 1997 Joyce Moss and George Wilson © 2007 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
