scholarly journals Facsimile of Memorials of Charles Darwin. A collection of manuscripts, portraits, medals, books and natural history specimens to commemorate the centenary of his birth and the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species

1988 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 235-298
Author(s):  
Sydney Smith
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Fiftieth Anniversary ◽  
Origin Of Species

William Yarrell (1784–1856), friend and adviser to Charles Darwin

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-114
Author(s):  
Christine E. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Small Group ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Beagle Voyage

For 25 years, from 1831 into 1856, the English zoologist William Yarrell was both a friend and adviser to Charles Darwin. He was regarded by Darwin as a wise and eminent naturalist of the older generation. Yarrell was part of a small group of naturalists, including Leonard Jenyns and John Stevens Henslow, whose interests in ornithology, entomology and geology expanded over the years. Their knowledge helped to support publication of the results of the HMS Beagle voyage and to inform Darwin while he was developing his hypotheses on evolution before the publication of On the Origin of Species, first published in 1859.

‘Short-Spanned Living Creatures’: Evolutionary Perspectives in Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely, but Too Well (1867)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Aaron Green
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Simple Structure ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
Crystal Palace ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Evolutionary Perspectives

Abstract In Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Charles Lyell appraised the distinct contribution made by his protégé, Charles Darwin (On the Origin of Species (1859)), to evolutionary theory: ‘Progression … is not a necessary accompaniment of variation and natural selection [… Darwin’s theory accounts] equally well for what is called degradation, or a retrogressive movement towards a simple structure’. In Rhoda Broughton’s first novel, Not Wisely, but Too Well (1867), written contemporaneously with Lyell’s book, the Crystal Palace at Sydenham prompts precisely this sort of Darwinian ambivalence to progress; but whether British civilization ‘advance[s] or retreat[s]’, her narrator adds that this prophesized state ‘will not be in our days’ – its realization exceeds the single lifespan. This article argues that Not Wisely, but Too Well is attentive to the irreconcilability of Darwinism to the Victorian ‘idea of progress’: Broughton’s novel, distinctly from its peers, raises the retrogressive and nihilistic potentials of Darwin’s theory and purposes them to reflect on the status of the individual in mid-century Britain.

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