Darwin’s Origin of Species [GK26][GK27](1859), despite its almost complete silence about human evolution, was the catalyst for widespread discussion and debate during the 1860s about the history and future of humanity; about slavery and the identity of the human ‘races’; and about competition and struggle in Victorian society. Three popular novels of the early 1860s – George Meredith’s Evan Harrington [GK28](1860), Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations [GK29](1860–61), and Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies [GK30](1862–63) – illustrate how quickly Darwin’s ideas were appropriated into fictions dealing with race and social class in the decade of the American Civil War, the Morant Bay Rebellion, and the Second Reform Bill. Although generally associated with literary realism, Darwin’s work may be better aligned with the new narrative form so popular in the 1860s: sensation fiction.

Chapter 2 examines how adaptive appearance could problematise Victorian natural theology through the example of the parson-naturalist Charles Kingsley. Kingsley’s faith was bound up with ideals of truth and sincerity, which he imagined as divine values that God’s creation exemplified and symbolised. Adaptive appearance challenged this textual view of nature, suggesting that nature’s aspects served purely to promote organisms’ survival, often through deceit. It is argued that Kingsley sometimes tried to resolve this contradiction by locating truthfulness in the rise of science instead of in raw, animal nature. In texts such as Glaucus: Wonders of the Shore and his evolutionary fairy tale The Water-Babies, he depicts science as a providential realisation of God’s values. However, Kingsley also sought to preserve vestiges of moral symbolism in nature since this notion underlay both his religious faith and the Church’s authority in knowledge of the natural world. Kingsley’s insistence on nature’s symbolism cohered with his insistence on the spirituality of the body, preserving a link between matter and divinity. This rhetorical strategy would be echoed by other religiously committed commentators who sought to reconcile adaptive appearance with the notion of nature as a divine text.