How Charles Darwin turned the western world on its ear
The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation By Randall Fuller Viking, 304 pp., $36
The idea of a book sending shock waves around the world seems unfathomable in our time, when the publishing industry churns out a never-ending supply of material to readers more divided than ever into niches. But Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species wasn’t just any book, and its publication in November 1859 was no ordinary literary event.
As Randall Fuller writes in his lively new study The Book That Changed America: “Ultimately the book would do to American intellectual life what the war did to its political, economic and social spheres: blast it to pieces and then reconsolidate it in new ways.” In short, Darwin’s case for natural selection and evolution rocked many a world. It called into question the age of the planet, the nature of existence and creation and the foundations of faith. It was a big deal.
Fuller, an English professor at the University of Tulsa, is primarily concerned with Origin’s influence on a circle of 19th-century thinkers, many of whom resided in the Massachusetts town of Concord. There you could find Henry David Thoreau walking the woods, cataloguing the rings on tree stumps, and the philosopher Bronson Alcott, pontificating on the issues of the day while his daughter, Louisa May, worked feverishly on her writing. Among the thoughts that race through your mind as you read The Book That Changed America: The average IQ of Concord must have been off the charts.
Fuller’s book finds its climactic peaks in such moments, as towering intellects grapple with the implications of big ideas. Darwin’s book never overtly addressed the origins of our species, but that wasn’t a major leap for those reading it. It’s not hard to figure why it was hard for many to take.
My favourite parts of The Book That Changed America are its digressions, the character sketches and tributaries that flow through the bigger picture. Here’s Louisa May Alcott, addressing the issue of interracial romance in her early novel Moods. (Little Women would come later.) Here’s Thoreau, waxing poetic on the wreckage left behind by a devastating forest fire. Here’s P.T. Barnum, hyping the microcephalic William Henry (Zip) Johnson as the “Connecting link between Man and Brute !!!! ”
Fuller connects these characters and episodes to Darwin with varying levels of success: At 250 pages, The Book That Changed America feels a bit too short, and you’re left wondering if it could use just a little more thematic glue. But that barely detracts from its larger pleasures, or the validity of its premise. On the Origin of Species did indeed crash down on these shores like a thunderbolt. We’re still feeling those shock waves to this day.