A Good Darwinian? Winwood Reade, Charles Darwin, and the Making of a Late Victorian Evolutionary Epic

In 1872 the travel writer Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man was published. It was an incredible synthesis that told the evolutionary story of human history from within the larger context of the origins of the universe. Reade relied on the work of historians, philosophers, anthropologists, geologists, physicists, and naturalists of various kinds to tell this universal history that attempted to map out humanity’s evolutionary future by situating it within the story of essentially everything. How is it that Reade came to write this evolutionary epic? The paper argues that The Martyrdom of Man was both inspired and shaped by Reade’s extensive correspondence with Charles Darwin in the 1860s and early 1870s. Not only did Darwin convince Reade about the value of writing a Darwinian history of the universe, Darwin was uniquely positioned to help Reade by directing him to other relevant sources and correspondents. By becoming a member of Darwin’s extensive network, however, Reade was also led to competing theories of evolutionary change, ultimately discovering that the larger story of evolution could not be told in strictly Darwinian terms. While Reade may not have been, in his own words, “a very good Darwinian,” his correspondence with Darwin sheds much light on the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration that was necessary to write an evolutionary history of such epic proportions, whether it was truly Darwinian or not.