Changes

The few decades preceding the publication of Charles Darwin’s ''On the Origin of Species'' in 1859 played an important role in setting the stage for how Darwin’s treatise would be received amongst the general public. It is during this time that the working classes, in Britain and most of Western Europe, as well as America, were developing their own sense of identity. A new class unity was slowly forming, founded upon principles of separateness from the upper classes, or as British historian EP Thompson puts it, “the consciousness of an identity of interests as between all these diverse groups of working people and as against the interests of other classes.”<ref> Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class.</ref> Crucial to this new consciousness was the recognition of the power of knowledge and education. A combination of factors, ranging from new types of schooling to the wide readership of “penny” newspapers had created a more literate and political working class. The middle and upper classes feared that the tight grip they had on knowledge and its distribution was being loosened by men who had hitherto been mostly apathetic insofar as education and schooling were concerned.

In his early editions of ''On the Origin of Species'', first published in 1859, Charles Darwin remarked that ''Vestiges'' was vital in preparing the public for his own theory of evolution by natural selection. In the third edition of ''Origin'', Darwin commented that ''Vestiges'' had “done an excellent service in calling this country’s attention to the subject, in removing prejudice, and in thus preparing the ground for the reception of analogous views”.<ref>Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, xvi.</ref> Darwin had actually written down his theory of natural selection in his personal journals the same year that Vestiges was published, 1844, but stalled in publishing his findings, especially after he saw the harsh criticism that ''Vestiges'' received from the learned men of science.

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Darwin gathered up the courage to publish ''On the Origin of Species'' primarily because a naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace sent him a copy of a manuscript that expounded a mechanism of evolution that was oddly similar to Darwin’s own. It seemed that the two men had independently come to a very similar conclusion – that the primary evolutionary mechanism was the “survival of the fittest”, as it would later come to be known. Darwin and Wallace decided to present their work to the Linnean Society (a sort of gentlemen’s club of natural history) together in July of 1858, but their joint lecture drew little attention. Darwin would finally publish ''Origin'' the next year, in 1859. The book was immensely popular – drawing both high praise and brutal censure – but the scientific world would never be the same.