Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword by George Levine
- Preface to the first edition
- Preface to the second edition
- Preface to the third edition
- Introduction
- Part I Darwin's language
- 1 ‘Pleasure like a tragedy’: imagination and the material world
- 2 Fit and misfiting: anthropomorphism and the natural order
- Part II Darwin's plots
- Part III Responses: George Eliot and Thomas Hardy
- Notes
- Select bibliography of primary works
- Further reading related to Charles Darwin
- Index
1 - ‘Pleasure like a tragedy’: imagination and the material world
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword by George Levine
- Preface to the first edition
- Preface to the second edition
- Preface to the third edition
- Introduction
- Part I Darwin's language
- 1 ‘Pleasure like a tragedy’: imagination and the material world
- 2 Fit and misfiting: anthropomorphism and the natural order
- Part II Darwin's plots
- Part III Responses: George Eliot and Thomas Hardy
- Notes
- Select bibliography of primary works
- Further reading related to Charles Darwin
- Index
Summary
Darwin's early autobiographical fragment, written in August 1838, just before he thoroughly stabilised the implications of his views on ‘transmutation’, describes his earliest memories. They are of fear, astonishment, the pleasure of collecting and naming – and the pleasures and dangers of storytelling (or lying). The stories he invented in his childhood were designed to impress and astonish himself and others. His passion for fabulation expressed both a desire for power and an attempt to control the paradoxes by which he was surrounded. At the same time he was exhilarated by the intensity of paradox. He was vividly conscious of the substantiality of what he had made up.
I was in those days a very great story-teller … I scarcely ever went out walking without saying I had seen a pheasant or some strange bird (natural history taste); these lies, when not detected, I presume excited my attention, as I recollect them vividly, not connected with shame, though some I do, but as something which by having produced a great effect on my mind, gave pleasure like a tragedy. I recollect when I was at Mr. Case's inventing a whole fabric to show how fond I was of speaking the truth! My invention is still so vivid in my mind, that I could almost fancy it was true, did not memory of former shame tell me it was false.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Darwin's PlotsEvolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, pp. 25 - 43Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009