Book Review: Charles Darwin: autobiographies.

This edited volume comprises Darwin's ‘Recollections’, written between 1876 and 1881, and a short autobiographical ‘Fragment’, penned in August 1838. The editors and the publishers are to be commended for making these important texts inexpensively available to the wide audience they deserve. For whilst Darwin's reflections are a valuable resource for historians of Victorian science, as a personal portrait of a deeply troubled, anxious and kindly (if somewhat egotistical) man, Darwin's reminiscences are enthralling and often profoundly touching. In this latter respect they also serve a broader function. As a needed corrective to Lytton Strachey or Samuel Butler's dyspeptic analyses of the Victorian patriarch, Darwin's words give us glimpses of candour and humanity from a period so often presented as steeped in affectation, hypocrisy and cant. The chief merit of this particular volume is the fine introduction provided by Michael Neve, in which he discusses eloquently what the autobiography says about Darwin's own self-image, the audience for which his reflections were intended, and how Darwin adapted the former to the latter. Neve correctly insists that Darwin's autobiography is not a work of unrestrained catharsis. Written exclusively for the consumption of his immediate family, Darwin imbued it with didactic purpose. Sieving and interpreting his own history, he sought to convey to his children the importance of industry, honesty and independence. There is no substitute for hard slog was Darwin's repeated, Smilesian refrain. Neve's introduction is also useful in that it explores what Darwin left out of his autobiographical reflections. For instance, Darwin was extremely reticent about the death of his mother, though this should not be taken to imply that he had recovered from her loss. And he was no less circumspect about many of the structures and supports that made his scientific career possible. Darwin presumably believed in his rhetorical construction of himself as a self-made man of science. But Neve rightly emphasizes the vast colonial infrastructure of ships, men and communications that made Darwin's voyage and his collection of specimens possible. Likewise, his webs of informants, family connections, allies, female editors and translators typically enjoyed only cursory mention in his autobiography, but we need to remember the essential roles they played in the genesis and presentation of Darwin's ideas. The introduction closes with a discussion of his exegesis on ‘Religious Belief’, Darwin's sincere attempt to persuade his wife and family that it was a surfeit, not an absence of compassion or humility, that drove him to agnosticism. For all the warmth of Charles's relationship with Emma, his rejection of revealed religion drove a wedge between them and brought both considerable pain. Yet the rift between Charles and Emma on the subject of religion illuminates more than an important, and rather tragic, aspect of their private worlds. As Neve points out, like all the best autobiographies Darwin's provides a microcosm of much more prevalent tensions in late Victorian society. And rarely is the crisis of faith more palpable than in Darwin's moving and heartfelt prose.