Abstract

This talk offers a broad, and sometimes unexpected, perspective on the seemingly familiar picture of Victorian debates about evolution and religion. As is well known, many authors had proposed evolutionary theories long before Charles Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’ appeared in 1859. What is often forgotten—particularly in the current 150th anniversary celebrations—is that there was a vibrant and sometimes virulent controversy about species from the mid-1840s onwards, which brought the entire question into public view, particularly in its theological dimensions.. This was sparked by the anonymous ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’ (1844). Yet Vestiges was in many ways a mysterious work. Its author was unknown for forty years, and although outwardly orthodox, the book seemed to many to be a pill of rank atheism. By comparison, Darwin’s “dangerous idea” was generally thought compatible with Christian orthodoxy. How could this be the case?