Introduction

Perhaps no Victorian was more startled by the implications of evolution than Charles Darwin (1809–82). Transformations of nature through natural selection were considered in his private and, eventually, very public writings; but even as they flowed from his pen, these ideas disturbed him. He was perennially torn about their moral and ethical consequences. The imagery of struggle, selection and extinction in nature that Darwin did so much to fashion was also ready-made to describe the rough passage of arguments and beliefs through history, including the struggle for survival of the evolutionary idea itself. Darwin and his followers identified themselves with a cause, but they were not always so sanguine about the social and political repercussions of their intellectual battles. This chapter situates Darwin's struggle – and his concept of struggle – in a wider context of nineteenth-century evolutionary thought and explores political and religious consequences of the claim that species (human included) are not definitively fixed in form, but undergo change over time.