Neo-Victorian Darwin

A plethora of articles and books and more recently films have been produced on Darwin, his life and works. Shortly after On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, a friend of Darwin George Romanes coined the terms “neo-Darwinian” and “post-Darwinian.” Ayres is interested in neo-Victorian Darwinism: How and why are neo-Victorians depicting Charles Darwin and Darwinism in some of their narratives and films. How is Darwin a product of the Victorian period? How and why and to what extent have he and his ideas, as a Victorian, endured into the twenty-first century? How do contemporary writers reinvent Darwin for the twenty-first century? To tackle these questions, Ayres examines two neo-Victorian novels: Irving Stone’s The Origin: A Biographical Novel of Charles Darwin (1980) and Tim Mason’s The Darwin Affair (2019), two biographies: Randal Keynes’ Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution (2002) and A. N. Wilson’s Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker (2017), and four recent films: Genius: Charles Darwin (2000), Creation (2009), The Voyage that Shook the World (2009), and Darwin’s Darkest Hour (2009).