Few lives of great men offer so much interest―and so many mysteries―as the life of Charles Darwin, the greatest figure of nineteenth-century science, whose ideas are still inspiring discoveries and controversies more than a hundred years after his death. Yet only now, with the publication of Voyaging, the first of two volumes that will constitute the definitive biography, do we have a truly vivid and comprehensive picture of Darwin as man and as scientist. Drawing upon much new material, supported by an unmatched acquaintance with both the intellectual setting and the voluminous sources, Janet Browne has at last been able to unravel the central enigma of Darwin's career: how did this amiable young gentleman, born into a prosperous provincial English family, grow into a thinker capable of challenging the most basic principles of religion and science? The dramatic story of Voyaging takes us from agonizing personal challenges to the exhilaration of discovery; we see a young, inquisitive Darwin gradually mature, shaping, refining, and finally setting forth the ideas that would at last fall upon the world like a thunderclap in The Origin of Species.

This concluding volume of Janet Browne's biography covers the transformation in Darwin's life after the first unexpected announcement of the theory of evolution by natural selection and the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. Always a private man, Darwin found himself a controversial figure, reviewed and discussed in circles that stretched far beyond the boundaries of Victorian science. Janet Browne here examines the wider publishing world of Victorian England and the different audiences that responded to the ideas of one of the leading thinkers of the nineteenth century and considers the Darwinian revolution from Darwin's point of view.