Ebook: Charles Darwin: Victorian mythmaker

A symbol -- The old hat -- What he owed to Edinburgh -- Cambridge : Charles Darwin, Gent -- The voyage of the Beagle -- 'Blackbirds ... gross-beaks ... wren' -- The ladder by which you mounted -- Lost in the vicinity of Bloomsbury -- Half-embedded in the flesh of their wives -- An essay by Mr. Wallace -- A poker and a rabbit -- Is it true? -- The Oxford Debate and its aftermath -- Adios, theory -- Immense generalizations -- Evolution old and new -- Mutual aid.;In this bold new life - the first single-volume biography of Charles Darwin in twenty-five years - A.N. Wilson, the acclaimed author of The Victorians and God's Funeral, goes in search of this celebrated but contradictory figure. 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 brilliant naturalist, 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 that explained everything. But was Darwin's 1859 masterwork, On the Origin of Species, really when it seemed, a work about natural history? Or was it in fact a consolation myth for the Victorian middle classes, reassuring them that selfishness and indifference to the poor were part of nature's grand plan? Charles Darwin is a radical reappraisal of one of the great Victorians, a book that isn't afraid to challenge Darwinian orthodoxy while bringing us closer to the man, his revolutionary ideas, and the wider Victorian age. -- from dust jacket.