The Kentish Hog

Adrian Desmond

• The Correspondence of Charles Darwin. Vol. II: 1837-1843 edited by Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith
  Cambridge, 603 pp, £30.00, March 1987, ISBN 0 521 25588 0
• The Works of Charles Darwin edited by Paul Barrett and R.B. Freeman
  Pickering & Chatto, 10 pp, £470.00, March 1987, ISBN 1 85196 002 3
• The Darwinian Heritage edited by David Kohn
  Princeton, 1138 pp, £67.90, February 1986, ISBN 0 691 08356 8
• Western Science in the Arab World: The Impact of Darwinism, 1860-1930 by Adel Ziadat
  Macmillan, 162 pp, £27.50, October 1986, ISBN 0 333 41856 5
• Theories of Human Evolution: A Century of Debate 1844-1944 by Peter Bowler
  Blackwell, 318 pp, £25.00, February 1987, ISBN 0 631 15264 4
• Controversy in Victorian Geology: The Cambrian-Silurian Dispute by James Secord
  Princeton, 363 pp, £33.10, October 1986, ISBN 0 691 08417 3
• Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture by Robert Young
  Cambridge, 341 pp, £30.00, October 1985, ISBN 0 521 31742 8

David Kohn opens his monumental Darwinian Heritage with a deftly-delivered kick, observing that a study of the wider institutional culture of Darwin’s day seems to be ‘beyond the present ken of historians of 19th-century biology’. It’s a well-aimed blow. Little of the Darwin industry’s capital has been spent on exploring evolution in its social context. It isn’t that the subject is taboo (as it was a generation ago), just that the pioneering work of the textual analysts scrutinising Darwin’s notebooks has dominated the scene of late – and rightly so, given their immense contribution to our understanding of the route Darwin took to natural selection.