Product Description
In a chest of drawers bequeathed by his grandmother, author Randal Keynes discovered the writing case of Charles Darwin’s beloved daughter Annie, who died at the age of ten. He also found the notes Darwin kept throughout Annie’s illness, the eulogy he delivered at her funeral-and provocative new insights into Darwin’s views on nature, evolution, and the human condition…. More >>
Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution
Originally posted 2010-03-20 08:49:19.
The time: mid-Victorian England in which “big ideas” influence, and are influenced by, culture, economy and society.
The place: Down House, Downe, Kent. The insects hum, the worms wriggle, the tendrils writhe, the metal tip of Darwin’s walking stick ticks and crunches down the pathways of the Sand-walk.
Let this book be your guide into the life and place of a gentle soul whose intellect was a machine for turning out those big ideas, from pedestrian minutiae so minutely observed.
(I was sorry the publisher, Riverhead Books, felt compelled to “sanitize” the author’s original title for the US edition.)
Rating: 5 / 5
I read this book, because I was going to meet its author and I was prepared for a very boring book, which is certainly not the case. Keynes is a very good author and he did a lot of recherche to write it. It is amazing, at least it was to me, to discover that everyone, even the children, wrote diaries and letters, almost every day and Keynes has made a very charmig selection to demostrate how his great grandfather could escape religion and become able to elaborate the Theory of Evolution.
Rating: 4 / 5
I’ve only read “The Origin of the Species” and had basic knowledge about about Darwin’s life, but after reading this book, I came away appreciating him more as a real person, a real human being, and a wonderful father. This book should display prominently during father’s day in your favorite or local book store. It would make a wonderful father’s day present. There’s a lot more to know about this extraordinary human being and am not claiming as a reader that this book is it, because it focuses mainly on Annie Darwin, his ten year old daughter who died of a long painful illness and as the author have researched, of the complications of TB. What’s amazing is that even thought in the face of such sorrow, he never reverted back to god or prayer but rather he just concentrated on keeping his little girl comfortable, reading to her, telling her how brave she is and being ever so greatful to have such a lovely daughter. There are also glimpses of Darwin as a fun dad. He took his kids on nature walks and he let them be kids, happy and rambunctious which was probably unusual in Victorian England. I urge you to read this beautifully written book specially if you’re a Darwin fan. It can really add to your appreciation of who Darwin really was as someone extraordinary and utterly human.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is a great introduction to Charles Darwin, the human being.
So often we think of Darwin as a thinker, a philosopher, a scientist, a villain, a hero, and associate him only with the theory of evolution that we don’t think at all about him as a real person. We never bother comtemplating who Darwin was or where he was coing from.
This book explores the life, lifestyle and personality of Charles Darwin and looks at the forces that shaped him and his writings. His love for his children, his grief over the loss of his beloved daughter from a painful chronic disease, his struggle with the idea of faith in God, his doubts about the meaning of life, all come together to introduce us to Darwin like no other books before has done.
Anyone at all interested in Charles Darwin, his writings or evolution must read this book. The reader will stop thinking of him as a caricature and start seeing him as a human man.
Superbly done!
Rating: 4 / 5
I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I had started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder), immutable. . . . I think I have found out (here’s presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.–Charles Darwin, in a letter to Joseph Hooker, January, 1844
Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882), arguably the greatest naturalist of all time, is best known for two works: his magnum opus, The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, Or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) and The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871).
The Origin dropped like a bombshell on a proud and complacent world convinced that human beings exist by virtue of a “special act of creation” which makes them fundamentally different from animals and “brute beasts.”
Not so, said Darwin. His theory of evolution by means of natural selection–”the survival of the fittest”–posits a more humble origin for homo sapiens sapiens, that of “descent,” or gradual development, from other animals.
Many books, essays, and articles, pro and con, have been written about Charles Darwin and his theory. This one by Randal Keynes is virtually unique in that it centers on Darwin’s domestic life at Down House, only 16 miles from the center of London, near the town of Downe, in County Kent.
Charles and his wife, Emma Wedgwood Darwin, had ten children, two of which (Mary Eleanor and Charles Waring) died in infancy. The severest blow, however, was the death of their ten-year-old daughter Annie, of “consumption” (tuberculosis).
Annie’s gravestone, in the churchyard of Malvern Priory, contains five lines: “Anne Elizabeth / Darwin / Born March 2, 1841. / Died April 23, 1851. / A dear and good child.”
To Darwin, Annie was “the apple of his eye,” his favorite child, and the “joy of the household.” Darwin and Emma never quite got over the death of this adorable and precious child. It was the most emotional moment, the central tragedy, of their lives.
One critic writes of Randal Keynes’ book, “Though there have been innumerable biographies of Darwin, there cannot have been any warmer portrayals of his humanity.” Indeed, in this, his first book, Keynes reveals Darwin as a devoted “family man” who dearly loved his wife and children. Here one finds not a cold and aloof scientific genius, but a warm and caring human being.
Although the book gets off to a slow start, but one’s patience in sticking with this volume is rewarded by extraordinary insights into the heart and home of a man who courageously sought to follow truth wherever it might lead.
A final confession on my part, although the admission is not quite like “confessing a murder.” Call me overly sentimental if you will, but this book brought tears to my eyes, the only book to do so in years. The tragedy of Annie’s death, and the author’s account of how her death affected Darwin, is a poignantly moving experience.
In Darwin, His Daughter, & Human Evolution, Mr. Keynes has made an admirable–and memorable–contribution to Darwiniana.
Randal Keynes, who lives in London, is a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin and a great-nephew of the economist John Maynard Keynes.
Rating: 5 / 5