The myth of the Darwin-Marx letter

Colp, Ralph

doi:10.1215/00182702-14-4-461

Cited by 12 publications

(14 citation statements)

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“…He withdrew his endorsement from the letterhead of a freethinking American journal, the Index, when its political line became discomforting to him. He refused Edward Aveling's request to dedicate Student's Darwin (1881) to him (Feuer 1975;Colp 1982).…”

Section: Public Appearancesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Charles Darwin as a Celebrity

Browne

2003

Sci Context

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ArgumentSeveral recent works in sociology examine the manufacture of public identities through the notion of celebrity. This paper explores the imagery of Charles Darwin as a nineteenthcentury scientific celebrity by comparing the public character deliberately manufactured by Darwin and his friends with images constructed by the public as represented here by caricatures in humorous magazines of the era. It is argued that Darwin's outward persona drew on a subtle tension between public and private. The boundaries between public and private were blurred by the ritual of Darwin "showing" himself in the flesh, either at home to visitors or, more rarely, on public occasions. The reputation for privacy and illness that he built up added materially to this public face. By contrast, caricatures tended to depict him as an ape. These apish representations played a significant role in associating Darwin, rather than any other thinker, with the notion of evolution, and in creating an alternative public persona over which he had no direct control.

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Section: Public Appearancesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Charles Darwin as a Celebrity

Browne

2003

Sci Context

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“…It is well known that Marx was impressed by Darwin's Origin of Species, although the idea that he went so far as to ask permission from Darwin to dedicate a volume of Capital to him turns out to be a myth (Colp, 1982). Marx mentions Darwin in a few places in Capital but on close examination there is much in the Marxian theoretical system that is antagonistic to Darwinian evolutionary ideas.…”

Section: Examples Of Typementioning

confidence: 99%

Theories of Economic Evolution: A Preliminary Taxonomy

Hodgson

1993

The Manchester School

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“…However, as this article demonstrates, there is no direct documentary evidence to support these claims in anything written by Darwin or his contemporaries—instead, scrutiny of such evidence suggests that Annie's death had no connection at all with Darwin's loss of faith. Therefore we argue that the ‘Annie hypothesis' should be classified, along with ‘Darwin’s finches' (Sulloway, 1982) the Darwin‐Marx letter (Colp, 1982), the death‐bed conversion (Moore, 1994) and ‘Darwin’s delay’ (van Wyhe, 2007) as a modern Darwin myth, which has arisen only in recent times and was wholly unknown to Darwin, his contemporaries and generations of subsequent commentators.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

The ‘Annie Hypothesis': Did the Death of His Daughter Cause Darwin to ‘Give up Christianity’?

Wyhe

Pallen

2012

Centaurus

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This article examines one of the most widely believed episodes in the life of Charles Darwin, that the death of his daughter Annie in 1851 caused the end of Darwin's belief in Christianity, and according to some versions, ended his attendance of church on Sundays. This hypothesis, it is argued, is commonly treated as a straightforward true account of Darwin's life, yet there is little or no supporting evidence. Furthermore, we argue, there is sufficient evidence that Darwin's loss of faith occurred before Annie's death.

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The myth of the Darwin-Marx letter

Cited by 12 publications

References 0 publications

Charles Darwin as a Celebrity

Charles Darwin as a Celebrity

Theories of Economic Evolution: A Preliminary Taxonomy

The ‘Annie Hypothesis': Did the Death of His Daughter Cause Darwin to ‘Give up Christianity’?

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