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On his death in 1882 Darwin was celebrated as something of a national hero. Although often controversial, he was “one of the greatest naturalists of his time”. Darwin’s correspondence is key to understanding how he achieved this status. The letters…

A review of Descent in the popular American journal Harper’s New Monthly, which misquoted the title of the book in the same way as the Bradford Observer.

The Dublin Review, an influential Catholic periodical, applauded Darwin for stripping a potentially offensive subject of all offensiveness.

Charles Darwin as represented in Vanity Fair’s ‘Men of the Day’ series in 1871. As this image and caption suggests, by the time he published Descent in 1871 Charles Darwin was well known and well respected for his major work On the Origin of the…

A review of Descent published in the Bradford Observer which adopted the common strategy of substituting the word ‘sex’ for the more palatable ‘sexes’ in the title of Descent.

The delicate and difficult nature of its content made it tricky for a reviewer from the literary journal Athenaeum to discuss certain sections of Descent at any considerable length.

A review from the American monthly journal The Galaxy went one step further, replacing the word ‘sex’ with ‘sea’.

The official organ of the Philosophical Radicals, the Westminster Review, also praised Darwin for handling sensitive subject matter in a temperate, cautious and modest way.

On his death in 1882 Darwin was celebrated as something of a national hero. Although often controversial, he was “one of the greatest naturalists of his time”. Darwin’s correspondence is key to understanding how he achieved this status. The letters…