Charles Darwin Victorian Mythmaker

Author: A N Wilson

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $49.99 AUD
  • : 9781444794885
  • : Hachette
  • : John Murray
  • : May 2017
  • : 49.99
  • : September 2017
  • :
  • :
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : A N Wilson
  • : 448
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Barcode 9781444794885
9781444794885

Description

Charles Darwin: the man who discovered evolution? The man who killed off God? Or a flawed man of his age, part genius, part ruthless careerist who would not acknowledge his debts to other thinkers?In this bold new life - the first single volume biography in twenty-five years - A. N. Wilson, the acclaimed author of The Victorians and God's Funeral, goes in search of the celebrated but contradictory figure Charles Darwin.Darwin was described by his friend and champion, Thomas Huxley, as a 'symbol'. But what did he symbolize? In Wilson's portrait, both sympathetic and critical, Darwin was two men. On the one hand, he was a naturalist of genius, a patient and precise collector and curator who greatly expanded the possibilities of taxonomy and geology. On the other hand, Darwin, a seemingly diffident man who appeared gentle and even lazy, hid a burning ambition to be a universal genius. He longed to have a theory which explained everything.But was Darwin's 1859 master work, On the Origin of Species, really what it seemed, a work about natural history? Or was it in fact a consolation myth for the Victorian middle classes, reassuring them that the selfishness and indifference to the poor were part of nature's grand plan? Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker is a radical reappraisal of one of the great Victorians, a book which isn't afraid to challenge the Darwinian orthodoxy while bringing us closer to the man, his revolutionary idea and the wider Victorian age.

Reviews

Entertaining * Observer * As a historian trying to put Darwin in the context of his time, there is surely no better biographer than Wilson -- Daisy Goodwin * The Times * Hugely enjoyable . . . The picture of Darwin that emerges from this biography is a mixed one . . . Wilson unpicks these contradictions with a scientist's forensic skill and a novelist's imaginative touch -- Robert Douglas Fairhurst * Spectator * A lucid, elegantly written and thought-provoking social and intellectual history -- Adrian Woolfson * Evening Standard * A book to treasure. A. N Wilson throws down the gauntlet on the very first line, 'Darwin was wrong' he begins. What follows is a sharply observed and wonderfully compelling analysis which evokes the Victorian titan brilliantly and challenges received wisdom. A work of scholarship that is hard to put down * Deborah Cadbury *