Charles Darwin Victorian Mythmaker

Author: A N Wilson

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $18.00 NZD
  • : 9781473620971
  • : John Murray
  • : John Murray
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  • : 0.624
  • : June 2017
  • : 234mm X 153mm
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : A N Wilson
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  • : Paperback
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  • :
  • : English
  • : very good
  • : 608
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Barcode 9781473620971
9781473620971

Description

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?