Book description
Christmas, 1859. Just one month after the publication of On the Origin
of Species, Darwin received a letter that deeply unsettled him. He had
expected criticism. Letters were arriving every day like swarms, some
expressing praise, most outrage and accusations of heresy. But the
letter from the Reverend Powell was different. It accused Darwin of
failing to acknowledge his predecessors, of having taken credit for a
theory that had already been discovered by others, Baden Powell himself
and Darwin's own grandfather among them.
For all the excuses that leapt to mind - publication had been rushed; he
hadn't been well - Darwin knew he had made a grave error in omitting to
mention his intellectual forebears. Yet when he tried to trace these
natural philosophers, he found that history had already forgotten them...
In Darwin's Ghosts, historian and novelist Rebecca Stott rediscovers
Aristotle walking the shores of Lesbos with his pupils and Leonardo da
Vinci searching for fossils in the mine shafts of the Tuscan hills;
Diderot, in Paris, under the surveillance of the secret police,
exploring the origins of species, and the brilliant naturalists of the
Jardin de Plantes first recognising proof of evolutionary change in the
natural history collections stolen during the Napoleonic wars.
Darwin's Ghosts is a masterful retelling of the collective daring of a
few like-minded men who had the imagination to speculate on nature's
ways and the courage to publish at a time when to do so, for political
as well as religious reasons, was to risk everything. More than a tale
of mummified birds, inland lagoons, Bedouin nomads, secret police files,
microscopes and curiosity cabinets, Darwin's Ghosts is the story of an
idea that would change the modern world. In telling the stories of
these men, Ms. Stott - who is also a novelist - writes with a novelist's
flair ... richly described
Rebecca Stott is a novelist and historian. She is Professor of
English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia
and an Affiliated Scholar at the Department of the History and
Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University. She is the author of
eleven books including three non-fiction history of science books:
Darwin and the Barnacle
, Theatres of Glass: The Woman who Brought the Sea to the City
and Oyster
, two historical novels, and most recently the bestselling Ghostwalk
, shortlisted for the Jelf First Novel Award and the Society of Authors
First Book Award, and The Coral Thief
, both of which have been published in many different countries. She is
regularly asked to contribute to radio and TV documentaries and arts
programmes. Rebecca Stott lives in Cambridge.
