The Quotable Darwin is the latest installment of a series that includes The Quotable Feynman (2015), The Quotable Jung (2015) and The Quotable Kierkegaard (2013), among others. Drawing from his writings and correspondence with friends and family, as well as his notebooks, Janet Browne arranges Darwin under forty-seven headings, including several potentially controversial topics (‘Race’, ‘Intellect’, ‘Human society’). Despite Darwin's central position within the history-of-science curriculum, this is the first collection of this kind to offer a quick and seamless route to Darwin's most important comments and observations. Spanning approximately fifty years, the selections provide insights into Darwin's youth, marriage and home life, political views, experimental work, and efforts to clarify and retain control of the theory of natural selection.
Darwin's notebooks have long been a key source of insight into his work and also a favourite of students meeting Darwin's writing for the first time. The resulting effect of Browne's selection and arrangement of materials closely resembles Darwin's notebooks, providing a reading experience wherein Darwin's ideas are met as flashes of insight (or bias, depending on the topic at hand). Darwin was a careful and cautious writer, and his most famous works are products of compilation. The varieties of evidence Darwin employed and the value it holds for his readers are of crucial significance, but at the same time Darwin's corpus poses a daunting and formidable challenge to the reader hoping to gain some insight into Darwin's beliefs. Like many natural historians of his time, Darwin compiled cases and evidence from a wide variety of sources (correspondence with pigeon breeders, agricultural magazines, physiological textbooks, travel writing) and organized this material to illustrate and support his ideas. Browne's work has condensed Darwin's labour into a series of key observations, coloured here and there with moments of biography, wit and doubt. Consider Darwin's interest in pigeons. His writings on the topic are, in a word, lengthy. Chapter 6 of the first volume of The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868) continues the discussion of pigeons that Darwin began in Chapter 5. Browne's edit includes a section dedicated to pigeons, where we gain a series of concise perspectives onto thirteen years of research and writing. Even with the availability of Darwin's work online, this volume provides a speed of insight into Darwin's thinking that cannot be matched by the search bar. While the evidence and cases that Darwin discusses are crucial to understanding his ideas, in many ways Browne has provided not a ‘quotable’ Darwin but an extremely concise edit of his works.
Browne's selection also reflects key debates over Darwin. In 1860, the Scottish writer Patrick Matthew claimed that he had discovered the principle of natural selection before Darwin in his book on naval timber (1831). Browne includes Darwin's defense that he had no prior knowledge of or acquaintance with Matthew's work (p. 92). Browne also includes Darwin's resistance to comparisons drawn between his views and those of Lamarck (pp. 90–96). Perhaps most interesting is Browne's decision to include a number of passages praising the views of his cousin, Francis Galton, on heredity, intelligence and marriage. Many historians of Darwin have worked to delineate and perhaps even distance Darwin from the claims of Galton, often based on their eventual disagreement over pangenesis. In this collection Darwin's sympathy and interest in Galton's work reappear at key moments, inviting readers to reflect on the connections between Darwin's work and the rise of eugenics.
Of particular interest is Part Four, which deals with Darwin's writing on mankind. Browne has condensed and concentrated Darwin's writings on race, society and women into thirty-four pages that provide ample insight into what might be better referred to as the un-quotable Darwin. Here, we find the Darwin who believed that the law of natural selection would determine the fates of nations and races, the Darwin who worried that vaccination would weaken the stock of the human race by preserving the weak, and the Darwin who viewed the widespread extinction of non-European peoples as an inevitable consequence of natural law. For historians of Darwin, these views are familiar features of the intellectual landscape of his day. But for those less acquainted with Darwin's writings, they make for challenging and disappointing reading. This section of the book reminds us that Darwin lived a long life, and that like many other white abolitionists his hatred of slavery did not extend to a belief in the equality of humanity.
Surprisingly, Browne's preface offers no guide to navigating this chapter. Readers are left to make of it what they will. While the aim of the book is to present Darwin in his own words, the volume would benefit from further discussion of some of these larger historiographical questions in the preface. Readers aren't provided with any context for Darwin's views on race or empire, but are told that ‘his personality shines out from his words’ (p. xvi). Darwin's personality by no means shines at every moment in this collection: his largest failings (from a contemporary perspective) are on full display. While Browne includes Darwin's own complaints on being misquoted and misunderstood (p. 209) and closes the book on a key misattribution (p. 306), the history of the places and roles that Darwin's ideas have enjoyed is left untouched.
This book provides further testament to Browne's thorough and painstaking knowledge of Darwin's life and works, and provides an ideal reference source for those new to Darwin and also readers already intimately familiar with his writing. As Darwin's works become increasingly available online, curated presentations of his ideas and beliefs become all the more valuable. There is no sign that people will soon cease to quote (and misquote) Darwin, and this collection delivers a key aid in reflecting on and studying his written work.
