A TALE OF TWO CHARLESES: DARWIN AND DICKENS

SAMANTAK DAS

The distinguished evolutionary biologist and historian of science, Ernst Mayr, wrote

in his masterful book, One Long Argument (1991):

The worldview formed by any thinking person in the Western world after 1859,

when On the Origin of Species was published, was by necessity quite different

from a worldview formed prior to 1859… The intellectual revolution generated

by Darwin went far beyond the confines of biology, causing the overthrow of

some of the most basic beliefs of his age.1

And the philosopher, Daniel C. Dennett went a step further, in his 1995 work,

Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, ‘Darwin’s dangerous idea cuts much deeper into the fabric of our

most fundamental beliefs than many of its sophisticated apologists have yet admitted, even to

themselves.’2

My aim in this piece is fairly simple, and can be framed as two linked questions. What

was Charles Dickens’s response to Charles Darwin’s dangerous idea? How did this response

play out in the course of the two novels Dickens completed after the publication of On the

Origin of Species?

Let me then begin with the first of these two novels, Great Expectations, published

serially from December 1860 to August 1861. Not many critics have taken note of the

temporal proximity of the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and Charles

Dickens’s Great Expectations. Gillian Beer, in her path-breaking Darwin’s Plots:

Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983)3

does not mention Great Expectations even once and George Levine in his Darwin and the

Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (1988)4, despite devoting an entire chapter

1
to Dickens and Darwin, mentions the novel just once in his entire book. This neglect has been

somewhat redressed in three essays, Iain Crawford’s ‘Pip and the Monster: the Joys of

Bondage’ (1988),5 Kate Flint’s ‘Origins, species and Great Expectations’ (1995),6 and Goldie

Morgentaler’s ‘Meditating on the Low: A Darwinian Reading of Great Expectations’(1998)7

although several of the concerns and anxieties that these two texts have in common find little

or no mention here.

Before proceeding further, it is perhaps necessary to note that critics differ about

which of these two authors influenced the other more. Gillian Beer is of the opinion that:

… the organisation of The Origin of Species seems to owe a good deal to the

example of one of Darwin’s most frequently read authors, Charles Dickens, with

its apparently unruly superfluity of material gradually and retrospectively

revealing itself as order, its superfecundity of instance serving an argument which

can reveal itself only through instance and relations.8

Direct literary influence is not always easy to detect, let alone confirm, especially in the

absence of extra-literary, extra-textual evidence. This is particularly true in this case since

there is little or no proof of personal acquaintance, leave alone friendship, between Charles

Robert Darwin and Charles John Huffam Dickens. The two men do not seem to have

corresponded with each other, although they had been part of the same London social and

literary world since their twenties and had been elected members of the Athenaeum Club on

the same day, 21 June 1838. What we do know however, is that Darwin was an avid reader of

Dickens’s novels throughout his life, and that Dickens possessed a copy of the first edition of

Darwin’s Origin of Species.9

There is also the evidence of two lengthy (unsigned) essays that appeared in All the

Year Round during the year that separated the publication of On the Origin of Species and the

2
first installment of Great Expectations. These two essays, “Species” (2 June 1860) and

“Natural Selection” (7 July 1860), deal explicitly with Darwin’s book and the second is, in

fact, a review of Origin, where Darwin’s theory is presented (often, without attribution, in

Darwin’s own words) with some care and attention to detail. The earlier essay on species also

quoted Darwin (again, without attribution!) at some length10.

As Levine notes:

Two essays so generously indulgent of the development [i.e. Darwin’s] theory in

a journal as tightly controlled as All the Year Round seem very unlikely unless

Dickens was ready to endorse the idea himself.11

The concluding lines of “Natural Selection”, assert that if:

Mr. Darwin’s theory be true, nothing can prevent its ultimate and general

reception, however much it may pain and shock those to whom it is propounded

for the first time. If it be merely a clever hypothesis, an ingenious hallucination,

… its failure will be nothing new in the history of science.12

Or, in other words, the scientific ‘fitness’ of Darwin’s theory will determine its ‘survival’.

From the foregoing, it seems not unreasonable to conjecture that Dickens had been

made aware of, and probably was favourably inclined to, Darwin’s theory, as outlined in

Origin, in the months immediately preceding his composition of Great Expectations.

As mentioned earlier, few critics have addressed this question. They have chosen

instead to concentrate on another novel by Dickens, Bleak House, completed six years before

Origin to illustrate his affinities with Darwin, perhaps because of what Beer calls

‘superfecundity’ and ‘profusion’13, something she finds in both Bleak House and Origin and

also because of the way in which both texts foreground genealogy as the ‘hidden bond’14 that

reveals connections between apparently dissimilar phenomena. Levine, too, compares Origin

to Bleak House. The refrain, ‘What connexion can there be?’ which echoes through all of

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Bleak House is answered by genealogy, just as Darwin’s question about the meaning of the

‘natural system’ is answered: ‘All true classification is genealogical; … community of

descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking, and not some

unknown plan of creation’. The juxtaposition of the separate worlds of Chesney Wold and

Tom-All-Alone’s in sequential chapters implies just such a ‘hidden bond’, 15 which is laden

with moral implications.

Such comparisons, whilst valuable in showing how Dickens and Darwin dealt in

similar ways with some of the most important social, moral and philosophical questions of

their time and how Dickens’s novels ‘often seem to be narrative enactments of Darwin’s

theory’16, seem to avoid addressing the (perhaps naïve) question of if and how Darwin’s

theory influenced Dickens’s fiction.

Perhaps one reason why scholars shy away from asking questions about the influence

of Darwin on Dickens has to do with the apparently obvious fact that Origin does not deal

with human beings whereas the human being in society is at the very centre of Dickens’s

universe, and it is not until he publishes his Descent of Man, in 1871, that Darwin makes

explicit his ideas about human beings and human social organisation.

A careful reading of Origin however reveals that far from being coy about extending

his thesis to human beings, Darwin was, as it were, preparing the ground for Descent in

Origin. He did this by using a set of interwoven narrative strategies in Origin, whereby

human beings are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) brought within the fold of his grand

narrative of evolution.

The strategies that Darwin uses to bring humans within the fold of his theory include

the following:

1. Using words and phrases that are usually applied to humans.

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 The full title of Origin is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or

the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The word ‘race’ had been used

to refer to the common descendants of a specific person from the 16th century onwards and

the word ‘races’ in the sense of various physically/ethnically distinct groups of human beings

from the 18th century17. Both meanings were current in Darwin’s time.

2. Using all-inclusive terms which, implicitly, include humans within their ambit.

In the ‘Introduction’ to his work, Darwin writes of ‘the Struggle for Existence

amongst all organic beings throughout the world’ and of how the ‘mutual relations’ between

living beings are ‘of the highest importance, for they determine the present welfare, and, as I

believe, the future success and modification of every inhabitant of this world.’18

In the chapter on ‘Struggle for Existence’ (Chapter III), we find, ‘there is no exception

to the rule that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate ...’19, while Chapter

X, ‘On the Geological Succession of Organic Beings’ gives us ‘… the increase of every living

being is constantly being checked by unperceived injurious agencies …’20 and Chapter XIII

asserts ‘As all the organic beings, extinct and recent, which have ever lived on this earth have

to be classed together, and as all have been connected together by the finest gradations …’21.

We may also note here the reference to the ‘hidden bond’ of genealogy in the final chapter of

Origin: ‘The real affinities of all organic beings are due to inheritance or community of

descent.’22 The examples can be multiplied many-fold.

3. Using illustrative examples from the world of human beings.

The quotation used above from Chapter III reads, in full:

There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally increases at so

high a rate, that if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny

of a single pair. Even slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-five years, and at

5
 this rate, in a few thousand years, there would literally not be standing room for

his progeny.23

In Chapter XI, while discussing ‘Geographical Distribution’ Darwin writes,

The various beings thus left stranded may be compared with savage races of

man, driven up and surviving in the mountain-fastnesses of almost every land,

which serve as a record, full of interest to us, of the former inhabitants of the

surrounding lowlands.24

We may also note, in passing, Darwin’s use of the word ‘races’ here, echoing its use in the

title of his work.

In Chapter XIII, ‘Mutual Affinities of Organic Beings: Morphology: Embryology:

Rudimentary Organs’, also known as the ‘Classification’ chapter, we come across this:

If it could be proved that the Hottentot had descended from the Negro, I think he

would be classed under the Negro group, however much he might differ in colour

and other important characters from negroes.25

In the same chapter, in the section on ‘Embryology’, we have the remarkable

statement (reminiscent of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals) 26:

It is commonly assumed, perhaps from monstrosities affecting the embryo at a

very early period, that slight variations necessarily appear at an equally early

period. But we have little evidence on this head – indeed the evidence rather

points the other way … We see this plainly in our own children; we cannot

always tell whether the child will be tall or short, or what its precise features will

be.27

In the final chapter of Origin, Chapter XIV, ‘Recapitulation and Conclusion’, we come

across this series: ‘The framework of bones being the same in the hand of a man, wing of a

6
bat, fin of the porpoise, and leg of the horse ...’28 Note the juxtaposition of ‘man’ with

mammals who inhabit, respectively, air, water, and land.

4. Anthropomorphising nature and natural processes, and using comparisons and

analogies from the world of human beings.

Chapter IV on ‘Natural Selection’, has a section on ‘Sexual Selection’, where we

come across these two examples: ‘… male alligators have been described as fighting,

bellowing and whirling around, like Indians in a war dance …’29 and ‘… for the shield may

be as important for victory, as the sword or spear’.30 (This last statement while describing

various biological contrivances for attack and defence is carnivores).

The longest comparison between the human and the natural worlds in Origin occurs

in Chapter XII, which speaks of the ‘mutual affinities of organic beings’, 31 where there is an

entire paragraph devoted to human language, providing perhaps the best example in Origin of

Darwin’s tactic of drawing in the human subject into his discourse - which is apparently

about nature (sans humanity).

The net result of Darwin’s narrative strategy, or interwoven narrative strategies, was

to ensure that when the perceptive reader came across the statement, ‘Therefore I would infer

from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have

descended from one primordial form into which life was first breathed’,32 she would be left in

no doubt that ‘all the organic beings’ included humans. It would not take Darwin’s statement,

made some three pages after this, that light would be ‘thrown on the origin of man and his

history’33 to alert her to this, by now fairly obvious, fact.

Given all this, it would perhaps not be too far-fetched to conjecture that Origin had

some bearing on the composition of both Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend.

Perhaps the first thing we should note is the ‘superfecundity’ that Beer speaks of, the huge

number of characters, places and things that populate these texts – what Levine writes of as

7
being ‘part of a world overwhelmingly vital because abundant, multitudinous, diverse, full of

aberration, distortions, irrationality’.34 As Beer rightly asserts:

The unruly superfluity of Darwin’s material at first gives an impression of

superfecundity without design. Only gradually and retrospectively does the force

of the argument emerge from the profusion of example. Such profusion indeed,

is, as in Dickens, the argument: variability, struggle, the power of generation and

of generations, the ‘broken and failing groups of organic beings’, are exemplified

abundantly.35

Second, we need to note how this abundant, apparently superfluous, multitudinous

material is part of what Darwin characterised as ‘one long argument’. Origin, Great

Expectations and Our Mutual Friend revel in the teeming mass of detail, in particular

descriptions of people, places and things. Yet the multifariousness of the text is never

allowed, as it were, to run away with the tale. The argument is never lost sight of, even when

the author is apparently trawling in some more-or-less distant alleyway.

The ‘one long argument’ of Origin is no simple matter, it is a complex, finely

nuanced bit of reasoning – as critics and commentators and historians of science have long

noted – and Darwin himself was well aware of this. In similar fashion, although in a vastly

different genre, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend also carry through a sustained

argument about the nature of human identity.

From the well-known and loved opening lines of Great Expectations, ‘My father’s

family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both

names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called

Pip,’ to the equivocal closing, ‘… and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed

to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her’, the novel seems to be asking the

8
question, ‘What determines a human being?’ and trying to answer it by a close examination

of a single human life, narrated by the person who has lived it.

Dickens, like Darwin, goes to some pains to make explicit the terms of his

examination. This is apparent if we take a closer look at the opening sentence of the novel,

which begins by evoking genealogy (‘My father’s family name’) but goes on to negate it

(‘nothing longer or more explicit’) in favour of an indefinite state which is more in potentia

than realised (‘than Pip’). By naming his protagonist Pip, and by stating this in the opening

sentence of his novel, Dickens seems to be deliberately drawing our attention to the fact that

a pip is a seed, containing within itself many possible futures, each dependent on the nature

of the soil on which it is cast and the nourishment it receives.

By using the next few lines to reveal Pip’s orphaned state and the following few

chapters to stress the difference between him and his only surviving sibling, the terrifying

(for Pip, at least) Mrs. Joe, Dickens seems to be moving away from the rather mechanically

contrived genealogical connections of Bleak House towards a more ‘Darwinian’ vision of a

world where success or failure is determined by the outcome/s of an individual’s interactions

with her/his environment.

A core concept of Darwinian evolution is that life, represented not by the species but

by the individual (whether plant or animal, insect or human), struggles to adapt to its

environment, which is itself subject to change. Life forms that adapt successfully flourish,

while those that fail to do so, perish. This ‘survival of the fittest’ takes place at the individual

level and it is the success of the individual that leads, ultimately, to the birth (‘the origin’) of

new forms of life (‘of species’).

It may take millennia for new species to emerge but the struggle for adaptation

(‘survival’) takes place not in geological time, spanning millions of years, but at the more

readily graspable scale of a single life span. Once we recognise this, it becomes possible for

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us to see how commentators on Darwin (his champions as well as his critics) were able to

transplant his huge time scales onto events that take place over just a few years. In other

words, the story of Pip’s life, showing the struggle of an individual organism to adapt to its

changing environment/s, is very much of a Darwinian tale of the ‘struggle for existence’ in

which all living beings are engaged.

In the case of Pip, Joe and Magwitch, what is important is not genealogy (note that

Joe is given none by Dickens) but what, most appropriately, may be termed ‘ecology’36 – the

study of the interactions between organisms and their physical environment. The brother and

sister pair of Lizzie and Charlie serves a similar purpose in Our Mutual Friend. Both have the

same genealogy but it is their ecological struggle that ensures success in one instance (Lizzie)

and social and moral failure in the other.

If, as Beer and Levine assert, Dickens’s vision in Bleak House is largely genealogical

(revealing the interconnectedness of individuals as diverse as Jo the crossing sweeper and the

aristocratic Lord and Lady Dedlock and between ‘institutions’ as different as the Court of

Chancery and Tom-all-Alone’s), his vision in Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend is

largely ecological. That is to say, although genealogy is present (think of Estella’s parentage)

what is far more important are the interactions between an individual (qua individual) and his

or her environment/s. In fact, Dickens goes to some lengths to deny genealogy and its effects

in both these novels in order to stress instead the ecological relations between people, places

and things. In fine, if Bleak House operates within a genealogical frame, then Great

Expectations and Our Mutual Friend do so within an ecological one.

Such an ecological framework denies the existence of an essential, generalised

‘human nature’ just as it denies individual, or genealogical, manifestations of this ‘nature’.

People are what they are, and act in the ways they do, neither because there is any essential,

unchanging ‘stuff’ in them that leads them to be and to act in the ways they do, nor because

10
there is something in their ‘blood’ that makes them that way, but because they are constantly

interacting, struggling, and fighting in order to survive in a variety of changing environments.

This emphasis on the struggle for survival is what gives these two novels their

particularly ‘Darwinian’ quality. Those who fail to adapt to changed circumstances, such as,

in their different ways, Miss Havisham, Magwitch, and Orlick or Charlie Hexam, Bradley

Headstone and Roger Riderhood, perish. Those who manage to do so, such as Pip himself,

Herbert, Joe, Estella or Lizzie Hexam, Bella Wilfer, Noddy Boffin (again, in very different

ways), survive, and even flourish. We may note here that all the individuals listed have to

adapt to changed circumstances and their success or failure depends on how well they can

adapt to such change.

On the other hand, those individuals who do not have to reckon with change, those

who are already well adapted to their existing circumstances, are different. In their case,

Dickens shows, not the process of struggle, but the results of having successfully survived

through struggle. These individuals, such as Jaggers or Podsnap in London and Pumblechook

in the country, have their particular ‘survival strategies’, if we may characterise them as such,

and these strategies are made explicitly clear by Dickens in these two novels.

Darwin’s texts display progressivist tendencies although they are not teleological in

nature. That is to say, although Darwin at many places in his major works, including Origin,

uses the language of progress, of a movement from simpler to complex, lower to higher,

cruder to sophisticated, there is no end point towards which, in his opinion, such progress is

tending. This position is best demonstrated by the famous final sentences of Origin. Having

carried out his ‘one long argument’ Darwin concludes:

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object

which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher

animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several

11
 powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that,

whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from

so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have

been, and are being, evolved.37

The progressivist yet dysteleological nature of Origin also holds true for Great

Expectations. Both these texts resist closure. The final sentence of Origin shades into the

present continuous tense and the final sentence of Great Expectations fights against a single,

undisputed interpretation. In its original form, this sentence had read:

I took her [i.e. Estella’s] hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and,

as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening

mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed

to me, I saw the shadow of no parting from her.38

In 1868, Dickens revised this to ‘… and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed

to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her’.39 This final version of the sentence, as

Angus Calder, editor of the Penguin Classics edition of the novel, rightly notes, ‘… suggests

that, in revision, Dickens perhaps intended to make the last phrase less definite, and even

ambiguous’. For the later version hints at the buried meaning: ‘… at this happy moment, I did

not see the shadow of our subsequent parting looming over us’.40

Thus, although the progressivist strand of the novel makes it imperative that Pip and

Estella come together at the point where Pip’s narrative ends, the dysteleological strand

makes it impossible to assert an unambiguous ‘happily ever after’ ending. For, after all, are

not both Estella and Pip still engaged in their struggle for survival? Given the ecological

framework within which the novel operates, no one, not even Pip, can assert exactly how this

struggle will end, just as no one, not even a Darwin, can predict what ‘forms most beautiful

and most wonderful’ will emerge as a result of evolution.

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 When we turn to Dickens’s last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), this

shift from a genealogical to an ecological vision of human beings in society seems to be taken

a step further. Happily, unlike in the case of Origin and Great Expectations, this has received

some critical attention, for example from Howard W. Fulweiler in his ‘A Dismal Swamp:

Darwin, Design, and Evolution in Our Mutual Friend’ (1994), or, more recently, from Nicola

Bown in ‘What the Alligator Didn’t Know: Natural Selection and Love in Our Mutual

Friend’ (2010).41 Fulweiler and Bown both note the ecological underpinnings of the novel

though their conclusions as to Our Mutual Friend’s relationship to Darwinian evolution are

not similar.

T. A. Jackson, in a now-forgotten book on Dickens, first published in 1937, 42 rightly

spoke of the literary career of Charles Dickens as ‘the progress of a radical’ and it seems not

unreasonable to say that from Oliver Twist (1838) to Our Mutual Friend (1865), Dickens had

become increasingly angry and embittered towards a social order that seemed to have no

place, leave alone sympathy, for poor, the dispossessed, the disenfranchised, the underdog. In

Jackson’s evocative words, ‘… the end-novel [i.e. Our Mutual Friend] is as deliberately

grim, scornful and bitter as the beginning-novel [i.e. The Pickwick Papers] is irresponsibly

festive, frivolous, and light-hearted’.43

This grimness, this bitterness, that Jackson speaks of can be easily related to the

growing insistence on predation in Our Mutual Friend, which starts off in the very opening

chapter with the description of Gaffer Hexam, and the bitter indictment of Podsnap who yet

survives (for he is superbly fitted for the money-grubbing, hypocritical society so

wonderfully portrayed at the Veneerings’ parties) despite his odiousness, when the novel

draws to a close. Even Twemlow’s brave defence of the marriage of Lizzie Hexam and

Eugene Wrayburn cannot prevent the ‘Voice of Society’ from expressing its disapproval even

if one of them, Mortimer Lightwood, ‘alone brightens’ at Twemlow’s brave act.44

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 Let me go back to that essay published in July 1860 in All the Year Round. It had come

to a close with these words:

If Mr. Darwin's theory be true, nothing can prevent its ultimate and general

reception, however much it may pain and shock those to whom it is propounded

for the first time. If it be merely a clever hypothesis, an ingenious hallucination,

to which a very industrious and able man has devoted the greater and the best part

of his life, its failure will be nothing new in the history of science. It will be a

Penelope's web, which, though woven with great skill and art, will be ruthlessly

unwoven, leaving to some more competent artist the task of putting together a

more solid and enduring fabric.45

What seems to have happened between 1861 and 1865 is a shift of focus and a change

in emphasis from progressivism, in Great Expectations, to pessimism, in Our Mutual Friend;

but what I would like to stress is that in both cases Dickens carries out his examination in

ecological rather than genealogical terms.

Consider the fact that Our Mutual Friend has many more images, metaphors, and

similes drawn from natural processes (e.g. water) rather than natural products (animals, birds,

and so on). But more significantly, perhaps, the human and natural worlds are seen as part of

one great (ecological) continuum. Take this, for example, from early on in the novel:

The wood forming the chimney-pieces, beams, partitions, floors and doors, of the

Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters, seemed in its old age fraught with confused

memories of its youth. In many places it had become gnarled and riven,

according to the manner of old trees; knots started out of it; and here and there it

seemed to twist itself into some likeness of boughs. In this state of second

childhood, it had an air of being in its own way garrulous about its early life. Not

without reason was it often asserted by the regular frequenters of the Porters, that

14
 when the light shone full upon the grain of certain panels, and particularly upon

an old corner cupboard of walnut-wood in the bar, you might trace little forests

there, and tiny trees like the parent tree, in full umbrageous leaf.46

Great Expectations ended in hope but even if Bella and Lizzie find bliss in the tried

and true bosoms of John Harmon/Rokesmith and Eugene Wrayburn, Our Mutual Friend as a

whole offers no such redemptive view of possible social amelioration and/or progress. In fact,

the central fact and metaphor of ‘dust’ and all it contains and can contain reminds us of the

first part of the final paragraph of Origin, which is a lot less rhapsodically confident about the

future than the concluding part:

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of

many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about,

and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these

elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on

each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around

us.47

This ‘dust’ is the microcosmic and not-always-inanimate simulacrum of society at

large. Like a play-within-a-play or Magwitch’s autobiography within Pip’s autobiography,

this dust too contains gold (e.g. Lizzie) as well as dung (e.g. Podsnap).

To sum up then, what I have tried to argue for here is that post-Origin, Dickens’s last

two completed novels show a definitive shift from his earlier genealogical analysis of the

individual human being in society to an ecological vision of a ‘tangled web’ of complex

interconnection and struggle for existence. While Great Expectations ends on a redemptive

note of possible future happiness, Our Mutual Friend ends less optimistically with ‘a canopy

of wet blanket’ descending; the ‘grandeur in this view of life’ is now one of ‘famine and

15
death’.48 Not for nothing did Dickens reserve his bitterest invective for the way in which the

poor were treated in his ‘Postscript, in lieu of Preface’ to Our Mutual Friend.

16
NOTES

1
Ernst Mayr, One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary

Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 1.

2
Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (London:

Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1995), p 18.

3
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and

Nineteenth Century Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983).

4
George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988, reprinted Chicago: Chicago University

Press, 1991).
5
In Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Autumn 1988), pp. 625-48.
6
In David Amigoni and Jeff Wallace (eds.) Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species: New

Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press; 1995).

7
In Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Autumn 1998), pp. 707-21.
8
Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p. 8.
9
Dickens, in fact, was quite an avid reader of scientific texts and also possessed a copy of

Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology: being an attempt to explain the former changes of the

Earth's surface, by reference to causes now in operation, published in three volumes between

1830 and 1833, a book that had profoundly influenced Darwin when he had first read it in the

1830s.
10
Neither essay is signed, and Dickens scholars have not suggested attribution, leaving open

the tantalising possibility that parts of one, or both, may have been the handiwork of Dickens

himself.
11
Levine, Darwin and the Novelists, p. 129.

17
12
“Natural Selection”, in All the Year Round, 7 July 1860; p. 299. The full text of the essay

can be found on http://darwin-

online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=1&itemID=A509&viewtype=text; last accessed on

24 February 2015.
13
Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p. 48
14
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the

Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, ed. John Burrow (Harmondsworth:

Penguin; 1968 reprinted 1984), p. 404. All subsequent page references are to this edition.
15
Levine, pp. 119-120. The first five pages (pp. 119-124) of his chapter ‘Dickens and

Darwin’ carry out this kind of an examination between Origin and Bleak House.
16
Levine, Darwin and the Novelists, p. 147.
17
See the Oxford English Dictionary entry under ‘race’ for specific details. Also note that

Darwin changed ‘preservation’ to ‘survival’ in later editions of Origin.

18
Darwin, Origin, pp. 68-9. Emphasis added.
19
Ibid., p. 117. Emphasis added.
20
Ibid., p. 323. Emphasis added.
21
Ibid., p. 427. Emphasis added.
22
Ibid., p. 451. Emphasis added.
23
Ibid., p. 117. Emphasis added.
24
Ibid., p. 373. Emphasis added.
25
Ibid., p. 407.
26
Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: John

Murray, 1872).
27
Darwin, Origin, p. 422. Emphasis added.
28
Ibid., p. 451. Emphasis added.

18
29
Ibid., p. 136. Emphasis added.
30
Ibid., p. 137.
31
Ibid., p. 406.
32
Ibid., p. 455.
33
Ibid., p. 458.
34
Levine, Darwin and the Novelists, p. 131.
35
Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p. 48. The quotation from Origin is from the opening section of the

final chapter of the book.

36
The term ‘ecology’ itself, derived from the Greek for ‘house’ or ‘household’ (oikos), was

coined by Ernst Haeckel, one of Darwin’s most ardent champions in 1866, and Darwin is

now acknowledged as one of the founders of the science of ecology.

37
Darwin, Origin, pp. 459-60.
38
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Angus Calder (Harmondsworth: Penguin; 1965,

reprinted in Penguin Classics 1985), p. 496.

39
Great Expectations, p. 493.
40
Great Expectations, p. 496.
41
In Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 49, No. 1 (June 1994), pp. 50-74 and 19:

Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 10 (2010) – last accessed on 25

August 2014; respectively.

42
T. A. Jackson, Charles Dickens: The Progress of a Radical (London: Lawrence and

Wishart, 1937; rpt. New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1990).

43
Jackson, The Progress of a Radical, p. 145.
44
The final chapter of Our Mutual Friend is named ‘Chapter the Last: The Voice of Society’;

Lightwood ‘alone brightens’ in the final paragraph of the novel.

45
“Natural Selection”, pp. 293-299.

19
46
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. Adrian Poole (Harmondsworth: Penguin;

Penguin Classics 1997), pp. 67-68.

47
Darwin, Origin, p. 459.
48
Our Mutual Friend, ‘Chapter the Last: The Voice of Society’, p. 797.

20