It is possible that Darwin was freed from some of the difficulties he experienced in expressing the relation of man to the rest of the natural order by his reading of Dickens, whose style insists upon the recalcitrance of objects — their way of mimicking the human order without yielding their own 'haecceitas'. The theme of hidden yet all-pervasive kinship is one which their narratives share . . . .
"For example, Darwin sought to restore man to his kinship with all other forms of life. In that sense he was bent on an enterprise which seemed to accord with the surface ideals of his society and its literature. He sought the restoration of familial ties, the discovery of a lost inheritance, the restitution of pious memory, a genealogical enterprise. [p. 62]
Related material
- The Unlikely Collaboration of Dickens and Darwin: A Closer Look at the Three Reviews
- Darwin's On the Origin of Species Reviewed in All the Year Round — an Introduction
- Three All the Year Round reviews of On the Origin of Species (complete texts)
References
Beer, Gillian. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London, Boston, and Melbourne: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.
Created before 1989; last modified 24 July 2023