Learned Insane
Simon Schaffer: The Lunar Men, 17 April 2003
The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future
by Jenny Uglow.
Faber, 588 pp., £25, September 2002,0 571 19647 0 Show More
by Jenny Uglow.
Faber, 588 pp., £25, September 2002,
“... Soon after his 70th birthday, Charles Darwin sat down to compose a Life of his grandfather Erasmus, poet and sage of 18th-century Lichfield, brilliant physician, mechanical inventor, incorrigible heretic and evolutionist.* The biography was a mix of piety and polemic. Erasmus Darwin’s fate, his chronic diseases, strenuous urging of social and organic progress, and posthumous obloquy, were too close for comfort to his grandson’s hopes and fears ... ”