Introduction: Darwin and the Evolution of Victorian Studies

Abstract

F[ifty years ago, in just the third year of its own existence, Victorian Studies commemorated the centennial of On the Origin of Species with a special Darwin Anniversary Issue. An impressive interdisci plinary roster of scholars?including Morse Peckham, Bert James Loewenberg, Michael Passmore, and Cyril Bibby?weighed in on Darwin, Darwinism, and (in Peckham's famous term) Darwinisticism. Philip Appleman and Sydney Smith reviewed some of the early stirrings of what we now name the Darwin Industry, among them Gertrude Himmelfarb's Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959), Milton Millhauser's/ws? Before Darwin: Robert Chambers and Vestiges (1959), a new edition of the Origin introduced by Julian Huxley (1958), and a reprint of Francis Darwin's Life and Letters of his father, with a foreword by G. G. Simpson (1959). As we mark the bicentennial of Darwin's birth and the sesquicen tennial of his most famous publication, it's hard not to see the germs of much of the last half-century of Darwin studies in that Darwin Anniver sary Issue. Highly regarded biologists like E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Jay Gould continued to introduce editions of the Origin and argue over Darwin's legacy for modern biology. In Himmelfarb's dismissal of Darwin and in Peckham's startled response to the anti-Darwinian vitriol of a caller to a radio program on which he was being interviewed, we can see the continuing cultural furor over evolution and its teaching, especially in America, that has itself elicited scholarly analysis. But it has been studies by historians and philosophers, grounded in a wealth of primary sources, of Darwin's life and work, and of the work of his precur sors and contemporaries, that have distinguished the last half-century of scholarship on Darwin. Sydney Smith's shock at the realization that there is still primary source material to be edited and published among the Darwin papers at Cambridge University Library (110) surely gave way long ago to satisfaction, thanks in large measure to his own labors, at the sight?both in print and, increasingly, online?of Darwin's notebooks