He was formerly Professor of History and PVC and Dean, Faculty of Arts, Law and Social Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK, and Belcher Visiting Fellow in Victorian Studies at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, 2020-2023.
Hewitt applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Darwinism’s Generations: The Reception of Darwinian Evolution in Britain, 1859-1909, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Darwinism’s Generations contains the larger part of two paragraphs discussing the extent to which there is evidence that readers of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 came to accept his arguments. Not just that they were profoundly influenced by them, but that they were convinced and so converted. The case of the Cambridge zoologist Alfred Newton (1829-1907) is used to show that retrospective professions of immediate acceptance are frequently not supported by correspondence from the weeks and months immediately after Origin’s appearance, and also to raise the possibility that figures like Newton, who later made great play of his Darwinian credentials, made deliberate attempts to weed their personal archives of material that might have contradicted their public position. Newton’s private papers, which contain tens of thousands of letters from across his life, are notably and even suspiciously thin for the years immediately after the Origin. But even so, the odd scattered remnant does indicate that despite his later claims he was not persuaded immediately, and was moved at first less by Darwin’s arguments than by the vulgar personal attacks of Darwin’s clerical opponents. The second case is that of the geologist Charles Lyell (1797-1875). Lyell’s 1868 edition of his seminal Principles of Geology (first edition 1830-1833), has frequently been used to demonstrate the transformative impact of the Origin. The discussion here accepts that Lyell did go much of the way towards endorsing Darwin’s arguments, but points out that this was only after a decade of quite tortured doubt and intellectual struggle, notwithstanding his closeness to Darwin and his allies, and even though the earlier editions of Principles had themselves been an important part of the scientific foundations on which evolutionary theory was constructed. Lyell was an ideal potential convert, but his evolutionary beliefs remained narrowly providential in ways quite alien to Darwin’s own.Visit Martin Hewitt's website.
In one sense, then, readers dropping into Darwinism’s Generations at page 99 will be taken to the very heart of its specific purposes and methods. They are confronted with its central question: how individual beliefs were changed by the publication of the Origin; and with its fundamental proposition: that this change was more cautious and conflicted than is often thought. And they are presented with the sort of focused readings which are at the heart of the book’s method of ‘extensive reading’, the intensive sifting of the reactions in print and in private of a large number of subjects (over 2000 individuals in all).
What they will not immediately be confronted with is the book’s over-arching generational agenda. For the explorations of evolutionary beliefs are intended merely as a case study of a much broader phenomenon – the extent to which generational patterns shaped Victorian culture and its debates. Generational analysis is much in vogue; but largely across the last 100 years. Where it extends before 1914, it is more usually rooted in relations within family generations, of parents and offspring. Darwinism’s Generations has larger ambitions. While conceding that there were no stable generational identities in Victorian Britain, and accepting that the most widely-used generational theories tend to structure discussion in ways not which make the nineteenth century unpromising ground, the argument of the book is that generations, and indeed sociological rather than just familial generations, did matter in nineteenth century Britain. The response to Darwin’s Origin of Species shows this and offers many suggestions as to how and why.
Indeed it helps to demonstrate that Victorian cultural debate, while always a matter of exchange between classes, genders, races and religious and political positions, was also a conversation between generations. The viscerally hostile response of early Victorians, born c.1797-c.1813 to the Origin was quite different to the frequently easy and often enthusiastic acceptance of the generation born c.1830 to c.1845, the ‘high Victorians’, both in turn distinct from the sort of non-Darwinian evolution reluctantly accepted by the mid-Victorians (c.1814-c.1829), or the sectarian squabbles of the late Victorians (c.1846-c.1859). Both Newton and Lyell are marginal figures in this schema, born on the very boundaries of two generations, and not best placed to underpin this schema. And yet, as later discussions in the book of both of them illustrate, even their vacillations and uncomfortable compromises illuminates the cohering force of different generational standpoints.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
