Darwin's "Historical Sketch": An Examination of the 'Preface' to the Origin of Species by Curtis N. Johnson (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Darwin's "Historical Sketch": An Examination of the 'Preface' to the Origin of Species by Curtis N. Johnson Devin Griffiths (bio) Darwin's "Historical Sketch": An Examination of the 'Preface' to the Origin of Species, by Curtis N. Johnson; pp. xxvii + 425. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019, $40.95. A big challenge in writing an entire book about any major figure is to break new ground. Take the risky course and attempt to engage their full career? Or pursue a narrower strategy, diving into a smaller and less-studied aspect of their life and work? In Darwin's "Historical Sketch": An Examination of the 'Preface' to the Origin of Species, Curtis N. Johnson takes the latter tack with a zeal that sometimes overtakes its subject. The topic is the short, just over six-page "historical sketch" that Charles Darwin added as a preface to the fourth American printing of On the Origin of Species (1859), later revised and included in subsequent editions. The historical sketch responded to a range of correspondents who contacted Darwin to point out various earlier contributors to both evolutionary theory and nascent articulations of natural selection. When, over the course of a couple of weeks and after suffering a bout of ill health, Darwin did finally draft a preface in early 1859, he made a quick job of it, often relying on second-hand descriptions to give a sketch of each contributor and their relative priority. Darwin's "Historical Sketch" revises that hasty account. Over the course of seventeen chapters, Johnson explores the thirty-five figures cited in various versions of the "Preface." Drawing together materials from the Darwin Correspondence Project, digitizations of Darwin's manuscripts and books, and Mario Di Gregorio and N. W. Gill's careful study, Charles Darwin's Marginalia (1990), Johnson pieces together Darwin's engagement with previous writers. It will prove extremely useful to scholars who want to decode the "Preface." As Johnson explains, Darwin's references are sometimes vague, and many of the figures cited are obscure, their specific contributions unclear. About each previous writer, Johnson asks the same series of questions: How did Darwin encounter this writer? What did he read or know about them? And why did he cite them in this way? At times, Johnson's passion for expounding these mysteries becomes overzealous. Each section works laboriously through all possible answers before finally landing on solutions that often seem self-evident. At other times, Johnson spends disproportionate time speculating on Darwin's motives. Take the treatment of Baden Powell, whose work, Johnson argues, "may have deserved lengthier treatment," and for which, he suggests, Darwin "may have felt some embarrassment" (6, 7). This contrasts with the following observation that Powell's work "was certainly no forerunner of Darwin in terms of the details of his theory" and by Powell's "own admission … [was] not offering new ideas" (9). Why, then, is Powell's brief and seemingly appropriate acknowledgement in the sketch given such extensive attention in Johnson's study? I recently heard an interview in which writer N. K. Jemisin shared advice she gives to writers who work laboriously to construct their imagined worlds: don't make your readers suffer as you did. It's good advice for all of us. Johnson's unconventional approach to the study of Darwin's "sketch" has some interesting features beyond tracing out his engagement with more minor figures. All thirty-five subjects, in addition to Darwin himself, receive their own sketched portrait, adapted from other paintings and photographs. These illustrations add warmth to the study, but some are odd. William Herbert, Dean of Manchester in the 1840s, is depicted with an Elizabethan ruff and whiskers, his image drawn from a portrait of the third Earl [End Page 361] of Pembroke (also named William Herbert)—the founder, under James I, of Pembroke College. The glaring portrait of Darwin himself, featured on the cover, is from a mid-1850s photograph that Darwin did not like. (In a letter to John Hooker, Darwin observed that "if I really have as bad an expression … how I can have one single friend is surprising" [Darwin qtd. in John van Wyhe, "Photograph of Charles...