The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Volume 12, 1864, Cambridge
University Press, 拢55, ISBN 0521590345
FOR YOUR cousin addicted to txt msgng, there can be no better gift than this
latest instalment of Charles Darwin鈥檚 correspondence: 734 pages of prose from
just one year. Yet there is little in these letters that suggests the upheaval
that the idea of evolution was producing in Victorian life and on the
international scene鈥攋ust four years after the famous clash between
evolution and religion at a British Association for the Advancement of Science
meeting in Oxford.
The letters, of course, are written in elegant and extraordinarily polite
terms. They are a delight on those grounds alone although they could daunt
modern readers. But they鈥檙e not po-faced: writing to Thomas Huxley, Darwin says
that he thought a lecture would be 鈥渘uts鈥� for him, presumably Victorian slang
for agreeable. The main effect of this book, though, is astonishment at the
staggering effort the five editors put into it.
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