Charles Darwin, notes David Askew in a review of Paul Johnson’s Darwin: Portrait of a Genius, was not insensitive to the mores of his time:
Darwin’s mechanism [of natural selection] was self-regulating: it could explain the birth of new and the death of old species without having to turn to supernatural causes. It constituted a thorough rejection of the dominant natural theology of the day. Rather than publishing his ideas on the origin of species and the theory of natural selection, however, he sat on them – and maintained a public silence for two decades. This is not surprising. Evolution, [biographers Adrian] Desmond and [James] Moore remind us, was seen by the gentry to be “morally filthy and politically foul”, and Darwin himself acknowledged that to admit to the belief that species are mutable was akin to “confessing a murder”. Desmond and Moore also notice that he was happier “hunting with the urban gentry, rather than running with the radical hounds”.
Darwin did not seek publication until another researcher threatened to eclipse his own findings:
On June 18th, 1858, potential disaster struck. Another reader of [scholar T.R.] Malthus, Alfred Russel Wallace, submitted to Darwin a manuscript describing what Darwin thought was his theory of natural selection: “if Wallace had my M.S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract!” he moaned in a letter to Lyell. If published, it threatened to deprive him of any claim to originality. He turned to his friends for advice. Lyell proposed a joint publication of Wallace’s paper and extracts from Darwin’s work: both men would share the honour of priority. Darwin himself was reluctant to act dishonourably, but was persuaded that this was a gentlemanly solution. The papers were presented to the Linnean Society in July 1858, and met with silence: as Desmond and Moore say, “no fireworks exploded, only a damp squib”. …
Darwin became serious about publicising his theory: Wallace had finally goaded him into print. [On] The Origin [Of Species], an abstract of the ideas he had been pursuing at leisure, was published by John Murray in November 1859. In many ways the book marks the beginning of a new era in Western history. His ideas had been anathema in Victorian Britain but by the time he died were mainstream opinion: he had transformed long-accepted notions about nature and humanity. One of the remarkable aspects of the Origin is not only how revolutionary the work was, but how quickly its ideas about natural selection and evolution were accepted: here, we see a true paradigm shift. This acceptance is symbolised in the decision to bury the agnostic Darwin in Westminster Abbey.
The Dish 