![]() ![]() ![]() He never inhabited a ‘lab’ or donned a white coat. That the reclusive, respectable and unfailingly polite Darwin has assumed such centrality in the no-holds barred bear-pit of the World Wide Web may be ironic, but it renders both of these online projects – which are anything but fervid, and help recapture the historical Darwin – welcome and timely.ĭarwin was ‘a gentleman of science’ (arguably the archetypal Victorian gentleman of science) rather than a ‘scientist’ in the modern sense. But even in the absence of such projects Darwin would continue to fascinate historians, not least because of the totemic status he has accrued in the largely internet-based controversies around Creationism and Intelligent Design. In a historical research version of Say’s Law, the supply of primary source material by sites such as these will create its own demand, a point to which we will return. To a degree the expectation will be self-fulfilling. The expectation is for a sustained and growing interest in Darwin and, more particularly, the processes by which he worked. Quite the reverse, as the existence of these two sites under review indicates. Three years after his bicentennial – ‘history’s biggest birthday party’ as Steven Shapin described it – no one is making similar predictions of an imminent decline of interest in Darwin. In the wake of the 1909 centenary celebrations of his birth the New York Times detected a changing mood that made it ‘probable’ that Charles Darwin’s ‘fame’ had ‘reached its acme’. ![]()
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