Evolution and Political Revolution in Blackwood's Periodical Poetry

Abstract:In May 1861, the middlebrow British monthly Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine published a comic poem titled "The Origin of Species." While foregrounding Charles Darwin, the poem portrays evolution as teleological, progressive, and driven by the agency and desires of individual organisms—a misrepresentation of Darwin's theory. I argue that the poem undertakes this misrepresentation deliberately: the version of evolution it attributes to Darwin was associated with radical politics and threats to the social order. The Blackwood's poems call up these political associations to reduce the novelty of Darwin's theory and to hint at its dangerous social tendencies.