English Literature / Unit 14 ENL 1303 short lesson, about 20 seconds
Faith and Doubt After Darwin
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The idea
Lyell's geology measured the earth's great age, and Darwin's On the Origin of Species, of eighteen fifty-nine, made nature seem indifferent. A crisis of faith followed: some turned to positivism, some to Catholicism, and some to art. The anchor sees nature newly viewed as indifferent to every species.
In practice
Geology, evolution, doubt.
Where people slip
Doubt is a central Victorian theme.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Unlocks
- 1304Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- 1308"Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw"
- 1312Robert Browning
- 1322Matthew Arnold the Poet
- 1324Emily Brontë's Poems
- 1331Gerard Manley Hopkins
- 1334Thomas Hardy the Poet
- 1337Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat
- 1414George Eliot
- 1423Thomas Carlyle
- 1426John Henry Newman
- 1430Charles Darwin as a Writer
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