Charles Darwin

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What to expect

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.

(P)2017 John Murray Press Limited

Critics Review

  • 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

  • A lucid, elegantly written and thought-provoking social and intellectual history

    Evening Standard

  • 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

    Spectator

  • As a historian trying to put Darwin in the context of his time, there is surely no better biographer than Wilson

    The Times

  • Entertaining

    Observer

  • As bold, audacious and entertaining as I knew it would be

    The Spectator, Books of the Year

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