A Brill Calendar: October 2

Darwin and HMS Beagle's Return

Few biographies summarize the 19th Century as succinctly as the life of Charles Darwin (Shrewsbury, Shropshire 12 February 1809 – Down House, Downe, Kent, 19 April 1882).

In the year of his birth, Napoleon Bonaparte still seemed Europe’s demagogue, annexing the Papal States, while Goethe published his novel ‘ Die Wahlverwandtschaften’. In the year of his death it was clear to everybody concerned that Westminster Abbey would be Darwin’s only appropriate burial site, while the English inventor Hiram Maxin patented his recoil-operated machine gun.

It is seldom that an existence has revealed an inner consistency with so much energy in a superb articulation of the grand Victorian manner. The first third of it may be said to end October 2nd 1836 after Charles’s five-year long journey aboard HMS ‘Beagle’, captained by Robert Fitzroy, (RN). The second period until November 24 1859, is the hinge in a uniquely personal and intellectual quest conducted with scrupulous care and circumspection in an era in which the verdict ‘publish or perish’ doesn’t seem to exist.

The third and final phase started when the first edition of ‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection’ sold out. Darwin farthered 10 children: eight of them survived him, most of them ‘Eminent Victorians’. Galileo Galilei’s life, early in the 17th century is the archetype of scholarly living during the adolescence of the Scientific Revolution of the era of Newton and Huygens. Charles Darwin’s life shaped the future of biological and physical scholarship forever; including its philosophical consequences.