In the Introduction to the 1814 edition of The Excursion Wordsworth discussed the philosophical enterprise in which his poem was engaged and set forth his aspirations for man: the hope that the ideal may be ‘A simple produce of the common day’, by means of ‘the discerning intellect of man’ ‘wedded to this goodly universe’. In the ‘wedding’ (the unification and harmonising of mind and universe) the outcome is to be a lyrical materialism, a faith that finds its form in the common appearances and daily objects of the world. ‘Simple produce’ suggests not only what is intellectually produced by the union, but ‘daily bread’. And ‘common day’ is not only ordinary, but brotherly, even universal – that which is held in common. The idea of things held in common, of the extraordinary kinships implicit in the ordinary, is deeply felt by Darwin also, whom we know to have immersed himself in Wordsworth's poem. He sought a kind of inverted Platonism in which ideas find their truest form in substance.

Wordsworth continues to analyse the harmony between mind and universe in a famous passage which he added to the first version of his proposal. In it he sets forth his ideal theme:

This work has filled and extended my life over several years. During that time I have been continuously grateful for the resources of the Cambridge University Library, the English Faculty Library, and the Girton College Library, and for the helpfulness of their librarians.

The English faculty office has come to my aid from time to time by typing draft sections and I would like to thank all the members of staff. Dr Jenny Fellows, and members of my family, have read proofs and checked references. Historians and philosophers of science as well as my colleagues in literary studies have been most kind in inviting me to try out my ideas in discussions, seminars, and lectures. I could not have completed the work without the stimulation of friends working in a variety of fields who have been generous of their knowledge, offering me references to pursue, arguments to consider, and scepticism to combat. It is hard to name a few among so many individuals to whom I feel gratitude, but I would particularly mention the importance of conversation over the years with John Beer, Jina Politi, Sally Shuttleworth, Allon White, and Ludmilla Jordanova. More recently, Howard Gruber, David Kohn, Mary Jacobus, and George Levine have offered invaluable help. Gordon Haight and Barbara Hardy have been of help to me since the beginning of my career and, like all those engaged with George Eliot, I am indebted to them for their work.

GROWTH AND ITS MYTHS

Evolutionary theory brings together two imaginative elements implicit in much nineteenth-century thinking and creativity. One was the fascination with growth expressed also in Natürphilosophie and in Bildungsroman. The other was the concept of transformation. The intellectual interest in märchen, fairy-tale, and myth, which increased as the century went on, was fuelled by these preoccupations, while its methodology was indebted to evolutionary patterns of argument. The work of anthropologists and mythographers such as Müller, Lubbock, Tylor, and Lang was strengthened by reference to the work of Darwin and Spencer, though their responses to Spencer were on the whole a good deal less enthusiastic than to Darwin.

The extraordinary metamorphoses within the natural life cycle of creatures such as frogs and butterflies, as well as the sustained transformation of baby into adult, had long been a subject of marvel. Such transformation now became a preoccupation with theorists of development:

Darwin's early autobiographical fragment, written in August 1838, just before he thoroughly stabilised the implications of his views on ‘transmutation’, describes his earliest memories. They are of fear, astonishment, the pleasure of collecting and naming – and the pleasures and dangers of storytelling (or lying). The stories he invented in his childhood were designed to impress and astonish himself and others. His passion for fabulation expressed both a desire for power and an attempt to control the paradoxes by which he was surrounded. At the same time he was exhilarated by the intensity of paradox. He was vividly conscious of the substantiality of what he had made up.

THE VITAL INFLUENCE

George Eliot was often taken to task by contemporary reviewers for the persistent scientific allusions in her works. Henry James, indeed, complained that ‘Middlemarch is too often an echo of Messrs. Darwin and Huxley’. And R. H. Hutton objected to her use of the word ‘dynamic’ in the opening sentences of Daniel Deronda as being pedantically overscientific: ‘Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance?’ The surprise that any modern reader is likely to feel at Hutton's particular objection should alert us to the degree to which language that has now lost its scientific bearing still bore a freight of controversy and assertion for George Eliot and her first readers. If, in the light of James's remark, one turns to the Prelude to Middlemarch words that may now read as flat generality renew their powers of controversy. The concluding paragraph asserts ironically the problems of treating the social lot of women:

In The Expression of the Emotions Darwin describes fear as a primary emotion whose manner of expression has barely changed over millions of years:

Fear is, in the Victorian anthropological sense, a ‘survival’. Like certain primitive tribes, this primitive emotion survives into the modern world unchanged. Like them, it represents the primal conditions of man and allows us to observe those conditions still at work. Moreover, it occupies the same place in the metaphor of development as do ‘primitive’ peoples: fear is an emotion to be controlled, suppressed, outgrown. Reason is cast as an adult emotion, just as western European man is an ‘adult’ on the scale of development. So, like primitive peoples, fear is to be kept under control. Yet like them, it is still there, not fully left behind, nor entirely dominated. In the arc of development, fear is perceived, disturbingly, as at the base. It retains its insurgent power and is liable – like mutiny – to break out.

The effort of empire can be seen in the later-nineteenth-century preoccupation with fear, in a culture which set so much store by courage, or ‘pluck’.

Darwin has grown younger in recent years. He is no longer the authoritative old man with a beard substituting for God. Instead his work and life are again in contention and debate. Sociologists, microbiologists, linguists, sociobiologists, philosophers, feminists, psychologists, biographers, geneticists, novelists, poets, post-colonialists, have their say. Moreover, the publication, volume by tremendous volume since 1985, of the Darwin Correspondence has shown us that, so far as Darwin's theories go, everything started with a young man, eager for knowledge and adventure, who set out on a journey round the world just before his twenty-third birthday: the age of a postgraduate student now. The letters bring out the vivid engagement of the young Darwin on his Beagle travels, the ardour of his response to the natural world and the immediacy of his engagement with societies he encountered. His vacillations in language register how hard he found it to settle his opinions of other tribes. His struggles with categories break open settled taxonomies. The stamina of his mental exploration gives the lie to the outworn assumption that once back from the Beagle he merely settled into a comfortable humdrum life. He was still on his world journeys while he sat in his armchair, his mind packed with the materiality of the physical world and sharpened by exceptions noted. His greenhousee could harbour questions that unsettled the assumptions of the western world – and he determined to engage with those questions.

2009 marks a double celebration for Darwin: the bi-centenary of his birth in 1809 and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin in 1859. This third edition of Darwin's Plots is a contribution to that celebration. In approaching the material again I decided not to revise the original text (beyond a couple of errors). For the second edition (2000) I added an essay in the form of a ‘Preface’ that scanned recent developments around Darwin's writing. For this third edition I have added the essay ‘Darwin and the Consciousness of Others’. This relates Darwin's early thinking in the 1830s to his much later work such as The Descent of Man (1871) and Expression of the Emotions (1872). The topic is Darwin's abiding fascination with forms of consciousness in other organic life and his interest in the reasoning processes of infants and of other human cultures. That essay can be found at the end of this volume together with a further reading list.

I am grateful to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford who invited me to give the Romanes Lecture, 2007, the occasion of this essay, and to the Librarian of Bodley, where a copy of the essay has been deposited. I am grateful, as always, to my family and friends for their stimulating conversations and, particularly in this instance, to Linda Bree of Cambridge University Press with whom I have long collaborated and who encouraged this third edition.

Arnold wrote to Clough of Keats that Keats did not understand that one ‘must begin with an Idea of the world, in order not to be prevailed over by the world's multifariousness’. Darwin is on Keats's side of this argument. He begins with the multifariousness of the world, is even prevailed over by it, and then uses it as both material and idea. Such an attitude in itself goes some way towards resolving the problem of first causes and of teleology. He refuses any precedent ‘Idea’ of the world from which to begin. This is not to suggest that he refuses theory, or that he believes facts to be authoritatively inert. In a letter to Fawcett in 1861 he made his position clear:

In his Reminiscences of his father Francis Darwin wrote that ‘it was as though he were charged with theorising power ready to flow into any channel on the slightest disturbance, so that no fact, however small, could avoid releasing a stream of theory’.

During the 1870s and 1880s some of the further implications of evolutionary theory became apparent, particularly the social and psychological implications of Darwin's theories and their bearing on relations between men and women. One crucial and recurrent metaphor in The Origin is the heraldic record of great families: ‘all true classification is genealogical’ (404). Succession and inheritance form the ‘hidden bond’ which knits all nature past and present together, just as succession and inheritance organise society and sustain hegemony. Darwin emphasised the egalitarian potential of succession within the natural order: ‘We have no written pedigrees; we have to make our community of descent by resemblances of any kind’ (408). Variations in nature are not within the control of will; they are random and unwilled and may happen to advantage or disadvantage an individual and his progeny in any particular environment.

But in his two major works of the 1870s, The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin brought humankind openly into the evolutionary debate and emphasised not only natural – that is, unwilled – selection, but also sexual selection. Both the individual will and the internalised values of a community play their part in the processes of sexual selection.

The intersection of evolutionary theory and social, psychological and medical theory therefore became newly important. The bonds between biology and sociology are drawn close in the concept of sexual selection.

THE REMNANT OF THE MYTHICAL

Most major scientific theories rebuff common sense. They call on evidence beyond the reach of our senses and overturn the observable world. They disturb assumed relationships and shift what has been substantial into metaphor. The earth now only seems immovable. Such major theories tax, affront, and exhilarate those who first encounter them, although in fifty years or so they will be taken for granted, part of the apparently common-sense set of beliefs which instructs us that the earth revolves around the sun whatever our eyes may suggest. When it is first advanced, theory is at its most fictive. The awkwardness of fit between the natural world as it is currently perceived and as it is hypothetically imagined holds the theory itself for a time within a provisional scope akin to that of fiction. Throughout the 1850s and well into the 1860s, for example, evolutionary theory was commonly referred to as ‘the Development Hypothesis’.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn discusses this phase in the conception and reception of a new scientific idea:

Early in Darwin's Plots, Gillian Beer argues that On the Origin of Species is ‘one of the most extraordinary examples of a work which included more than the maker of it at the time knew, despite all that he did know’. With these words Professor Beer initiated an enterprise that itself probably included more than she knew, despite all that she did know – which, to say the least, was a lot. For the book remains as alive and important now as it was when it appeared in 1983, on the first crest of the booming ‘Darwin Industry’, which has in the past fifteen years expanded even beyond the imagination of those who already understood how enormously rich and fertile Darwin's thought remained. Unlike most great scientists of the past, whose work has been absorbed by science (and often by culture) and marked as a brilliant stage toward later developments, Darwin remains strangely and almost charismatically alive – he ‘has grown younger in recent years’, says Professor Beer – and evolutionary biology remains an active force in science and beyond.

Darwin's Plots identifies a ‘remnant of the mythical’ in his arguments, a not quite complete fit ‘between material and theory’, a willingness to fall back on ‘unknown laws’, a passion for multiplicity and for aberrations. In teaching us how Darwin's metaphors and language work, by refusing any simple placement of his thought, either historical or philosophical, Professor Beer in effect predicted his continuing power to fertilise and disturb.