Dimensions
162 x 240 x 45mm
This dramatic book, by two of the world's leading Darwin scholars, process a radical rethinking of the origins of Darwin's though and the background to his first world-changing masterpiece, The Origin of Species.
By combing minutely through his published and unpublished writings, his letters, notebooks and marginalia, Desmond and Moore show for the first time the degree to which Darwin as a young man was moved by an absolute detestation and horror of slavery. Slavery and the campaign to abolish it was one of the great public issues in the first half of the nineteenth century; Darwin's high-minded family were in the vanguard of the campaign and young Darwin drank their beliefs with his milk. When, in his twenties, he made his great voyage to the Galapagos in the Beagle, he heard, at first hand, in Pernambuco, a slave being tortured. The experience shook him so viscerally that proving the brotherhood of all the races of man became part of his intellectual raison d'etre.
One of the book's finest achievements is to show how Darwin's thought developed alongside and in reaction to that of many of his contemporaries, both those who argued for the unity of mankind, and those (especially the Harvard giant in the field, Louise Agassiz) who argued powerfully for the separate, and hierarchical, Origin of Races, and whose influence in America in the years before the Civil War was immense. The glacial gestation of the Origin, and Darwin's hesitations up to and after the moment of publication are explained. Above all, Desmond and Moore convincingly connect the growth of Darwin's ideas with the great humanitarian cause of his young adulthood. Contrary to beliefs still widely held, Darwin's thought was not the ancestor of modern racism, but was explicitly designed to counter it. Darwin showed that creationism was the ally of slavery and evolution the ally of abolition.
It is a trilling achievement, significantly changing our view of the most influential figure of the nineteenth century.
