Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In the first year of the third millennium, Charles Darwin replaced Charles Dickens on the British ten-pound note. He is celebrated again by the state, just as, over a century earlier, though his ideas had shocked and dismayed his contemporaries, no less than they had fascinated them, he was buried with Christian ceremony in Westminster Abbey. In 1889 the biologist and popular, prolific writer Grant Allen remarked: “everybody nowadays talks about evolution. Like electricity, the cholera germ, woman's rights, the great mining boom, and the Eastern Question, it is ‘in the air’” (1889: 31). Stringing together apparently unrelated concerns of the late nineteenth century, Allen could not have chosen a more consanguineous group. Social and scientific progress, and questions of race, race failure, gender, and disease were converging under the umbrella of “evolution” (see also Chapter 2 ). The politics of evolution had shifted radically over the course of the nineteenth century. In the early decades, on the edge of the hungry forties, atheistic revolutionaries were evangelizing bottom-up evolution, and the ideas of the French zoologist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744–1829) were appearing in the pauper press; the idea that an animal could transform itself into a higher being and pass on all its gains (without godly intervention) appealed to militant members of the working class. Lamarck put ... log in or subscribe to read full text