Book Review - Darwin: A Biography - Princeton University Press

      When Janet Browne produced her seminal volumes Voyaging and The Power of Place no less a luminary than Stephen Jay Gould proclaimed them "....wonderful and marvellous, even magisterial." Other notable authors such as David Quammen have gone on to endorse this viewpoint.

     I suspect they might conclude that this amalgamation of the two books in a single volume is no less magisterial. Browne has produced a wonderful new work, benefitting greatly from the Correspondence of Charles Darwin (1985-2023), material unavailable when she wrote her first two books.  

     She has successfully condensed her two-volume opus into a major new work, offering hitherto unknown insights into Darwin the explorer, Darwin the sceptic, Darwin the scientist and Darwin the man. In the process she cements her position as the leading Darwin scholar of our time.

     I find myself almost mesmerized by the depth and complexity of her treatment, all the while captivated by a highly readable, charming account of the most important scientist of all time. We move from the diffident young naturalist voyaging on the Beagle, often laid low by recurring seasickness, revealing his inner feelings and doubts in letters to his sisters, to the investigative scientist on the cusp of a theory that would change the world forever, to a dignified, empathetic English gentleman living a quiet life in Kent. He was a village magistrate, a doting father, a loving husband, friend to his butler no less than to the rich and famous. He was often wracked by ill health, and insecurity, and was initially devastated when Alfred Russel Wallace threatened to lay prior claim to his theory of evolution by natural selection.

     His attention to detail was nothing short of remarkable, with years spent researching barnacles, flowers, worms and heritability in domestic animals. He doggedly pressed forward with investigation on many fronts, all the while building up to the moment when he would publish his treatise to change the world, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. 

     He had always thought he would be buried in the local churchyard; indeed had expressed a wish to be so interred, yet when he died he was accorded that highest of all honours, that of being entombed in Westminster Abbey. No other final resting place would have been acceptable for this noble man who had become a household name in Britain even during his lifetime; although there was great irony in selecting this space to bury the person who had shattered the notion of a divine origin of life.

     The canon of literature in the English language is replete with soaring, stirring, magnificent, elegant, memorable and oft repeated phrases in prose and verse, but for me the most beautiful of all has always been, and remains to this day, the following words of Charles Darwin.

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."

     A portrait of the young Charles Darwin sits on my desk. He inspires me every day.

Darwin: A Biography - Princeton University Press

Janet Browne

Hardcover - US$35.00 - ISBN: 9780691232256

624 pages - 6.125 x 9.25 inches (15.31 x 23.125 cm)

79 black-and-white illustrations - 4 maps

Publication date: 02 June, 2026