Charles Darwin was a true man of letters. He not only wrote prolifically, he also read voraciously, as our three special guests at the Guardian Hay Festival earlier this month testified.
Darwinophile and momentary Oxford Professor of Poetry Ruth Padel suggests that anyone who wants to read Darwin should start with The Voyage of the Beagle, which she finds "fresh, vivid and personal".
"His writing style really tells you something about the man himself ... he was passionately interested in what he was talking about – life."
He also loved reading Milton, Byron, Shelley, Shakespeare and Wordsworth, but became hardened to poetry in later life. He wrote that, "My mind has become just a machine for grinding laws out of minute particulars and facts."
Steve Jones, science writer and professor of genetics at University College London, doesn't make any bones about Darwin's more scholarly scientific treatises, in which he went into "excruciating detail" about barnacles and suchlike. "I've read them ... or to be more accurate I've flipped through them."
But he highly recommends The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, "terminally weird and terminally ahead of its time", and the first published book to feature photographs - bizarre displays of the human expressions of horror, amusement and terror.
Jones also recommends Darwin's final book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, in which he provides the extraordinary insight that "without earthworms there would be no civilisation."
Our third guest, Gillian Beer, former professor of literature at Cambridge University, describes the breadth of Darwin's literary taste as revealed in the exhaustive reading lists he kept from the late 1830s to 1858.
As a student at Edinburgh University he read more novels than anything else - his family thought he read too many as a child. This love of fiction persisted even towards the end of his life, after he had lost all other aesthetic sense. He blessed novelists, but thought there should be a law against unhappy endings.
As for his own writing, he was driven to describe his natural subjects in exceptional detail because he couldn't draw. His style vacillated between his famously big ideas and extreme detail, as in his "rapturous" description of barnacles.
No comments:
Post a Comment