'In 1898 Armstrong organised the Ashington Debating and Literary Improvement Society, and his reading broadened out to Shakespeare, Burns, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Byron, Whitman, Wordsworth, Scott, Robert Browning, Darwin and T.H. Huxley. Robertson Nicoll's British Weekly had introduced him to a more liberal Nonconformity that was hospitable to contemporary literature. The difficulty was that the traditional Nonconformist commitment to freedom of conscience was propelling him beyond the confines of Primitive Methodism, as far as Unitarianism, the Rationalist Press Association and the Independent Labour Party. His tastes in literature evolved apace: Ibsen, Zola. Meredith, and Wilde by the 1890s; then on to Shaw, Wells, and Bennett; and ultimately Marxist economics and Brave New World'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Chester Armstrong Print: Book
'Rose... remembers her father reading to them - Dickens, Scott, Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Meredith, Tom Jones, The Three Musketeers, Don Quixote, and, curiously, The Origin of Species'
Century: Reader/Listener/Group: George Macaulay Print: Book
'The [1890s] dockers' leader Ben Tillett went hungry in order to buy books ... [and] thereby struggled through the literary classics, as well as works on evolution by Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley ... after his day's work in the warehouse.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Ben Tillett Print: Book
[analysis of a female respondent in Arnold Freeman's 1918 Sheffield Survey] 'Housewife, age twenty-eight... Has read "David Copperfield", "The Old Curiosity Shop", "Lorna Doone", Louisa May Alcott and the travels of Livingstone and Darwin'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent Print: Book
'Nottinghamshire collier G.A.W. Tomlinson volunteered for repair shifts on weekends, when he could earn time-and-a-half and read on the job. On Sundays, "I sat there on my toolbox, half a mile from the surface, one mile from the nearest church and seemingly hundreds of miles from God, reading the Canterbury Tales, Lamb's Essays, Darwin's Origin of Species, Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol, or anything that I could manage to get hold of". That could be hazardous: once, when he should have been minding a set of rail switches, he was so absorbed in Goldsmith's The Deserted Village that he allowed tubs full of coal to crash into empties'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: G.A.W. Tomlinson Print: Book
'For Dunfermline housepainter James Clunie, Das Kapital and the Wealth of Nations both demonstrated that industrialism inevitably increased economic inequality, the exploitation of labour and class conflict. To this The Descent of Man added "the great idea of human freedom... It brought out the idea that whether our children were with or without shoes was due to poverty arising from the administration of society".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: James Clunie Print: Book
'Ewan McColl remembered his father, a Communist ironfounder, as someone who was always giving him secondhand books. He "belonged to the generation who believed that books were tools that could open a lock which would free people..." At age eight McColl received the works of Darwin. By fifteen he had read Gogol, Dostoevsky and the entire Human Comedy: "They were a refuge from the horrors of the life around us... Unemployment in the 1930s was unbelievable, you really felt you'd never escape... So books for me were a kind of fantasy life... For me to go at the age of fourteen, to drop into the library and discover a book like Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or The Mistaken Subtlety of the Four-Sided Figure... the titles alone produced a kind of happiness in me... When I discovered Gogol in that abominable translation of Constance Garnett with those light blue bindings... I can remember the marvellous sensation of sitting in the library and opening the volume and going into that world of Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin in The Overcoat or in The Nose, or The Madman's Diary. I thought I'd never read anything so marvellous, and through books I was living in many worlds simultaneously. I was living in St Petersburg and in Paris with Balzac... And I knew all the characters, Lucien de Rubempre and Rastignac as though they were my own friends".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ewan McColl Print: Book
"Ellen Wilkinson, brought up in Ardwick, Manchester, went with her father to lectures on theological and evolutionary subjects, and by the time she was fourteen was reading Haeckel, Huxley and Darwin with him."
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ellen Wilkinson and father Print: Book
'after tea [W.J. Brown] would enjoy "five glorious hours of freedom" reading Darwin, Huxley and Tennyson's "In Memoriam" at the Battersea Public Library'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: William John Brown Print: Book
'One book... stimulated the poet beyond all others; it became, in a way, a key to the rest of his reading for some time to come. This was George du Maurier's "Trilby". It was not so much the work itself - though John Masefield enjoyed it more than any book he had read until then - which played so prominent a part in forming his tastes, but the other works which George du Maurier put John Masefield on to... Whatever book "Trilby" mentions John Masefield bought... On the oblique recommendations in "Trilby" he read the "Three Musketeers"; Sterne's "Sentimental Journey"; Darwin's "Origin of the Species"'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Masefield Print: Book
'We began Darwin's work on "The Origin of Species" tonight. It seems not to be well written: though full of interesting matter, it is not impressive, for want of luminous and orderly presentation.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot (pseud) and G.H. Lewes Print: Book
'what I write for is to thank you again for sending me your brother's [Charles Darwin's] book. As for thanking him for the book itself, one might say "thank you" all one's life without giving any idea of one's sense of obligation. It has been an immense pleasure to Maria and me...'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau Print: Book
'The conversation went on about Darwin's "Origin of species", and F. said to S. "tha doesn't favour a monkey, but tha acts like one." R. said "I think he's bloody crackers". S. went on to say their house was full of books, so F. said "Don't you think it's about time you started reading them". Eventually between them they got S. that tied up in argument he had to retire, and shook hands with us all and went home.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: unknown Print: Book
'I bought Darwin's last book in despair, for I knew I could generally read Darwin, but it was a failure.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book
Marginalia in pencil in English on the following pages: 59, 208, 211, 256.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vernon Lee Print: Book
'My chief pleasure at the moment is Darwin's [italics] Voyage of the Beagle [end italics]... it is so fresh, so clear, so solid, so modest, so alive. When I read a book like that I am full of admiration yet I feel so humiiated and despairing too...'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
'Reading Darwin's [book] I wish I had loved objective things and looked at them when I was a child instead of feeding always on books and fancy'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Passages transcribed in E. M. Forster's Commonplace Book (1943) include reflections on Australia from Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edward Morgan Forster Print: Book
'[from Gissing's diary] Spent the evening in a troubled state of mind, occasionaly glancing at Darwin's "Origin of Species" - a queer jumble of thoughts'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Gissing Print: Book
'In November [1859] [Tennyson] was reading with intense interest an early copy of Darwin's Origin of Species, sent him by his own desire'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Book
'I have been reading over his old letters. I have not many , we were so seldom apart...'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Emma Darwin Manuscript: Letter
'I have been reading your father's letters to William which he has kept... What a blessing science was to him through all his anxieties and his bad health.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Emma Darwin Manuscript: Letter, Letters from Charles Darwin to his son William.
'I am reading his [Charles Darwin's] ''Journal'' after a long interval.It gives me a sort of companionship with him which makes me feel happy- only there are so many questions I want to ask.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Emma Darwin Manuscript: Journal
'I have been reading the scientific letters, and in almost every one there is some characteristic bit which charms one.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Emma Darwin Print: Book
'I found him in ecstasy over your husband's book. He said it was the most attractive reading he had met with; that notwithstanding his ignorance of natural history he found the greatest interest in it...'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: J.C.L. Sismondi Print: Book
'Whilst I was abroad the proof-sheets of "the Descent of Man" were sent out to me to read.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Henrietta Litchfield Print: Page proofs
'You may as well say, which is a truth, that I do read bi[o]graphy and memoirs.
History has a fascination for me. Naval, military, political'. [The following was deleted
by Conrad in proof]. 'For instance, favorite books of his are Wallace's "Malay
Archipelago," Darwin's "Voyage of a Naturalist," Whymper's "High Andes", the sea
yarns of Cooper and Marryat and the novels of Dickens.'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
'Darwin, writing in praise of the gaucho in his
“Voyage of a Naturalist” says that if a gaucho cuts
your throat he does it like a gentleman - even as a
small boy I knew better'.
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: William Henry Hudson Print: Book
'I had to confess [to his recently returned elder
brother] that I had not read a line of his
[Darwin's] work, that with the exception of
Draper's "History of Civilisation" which had come
by chance in my way, I had, during all those five
years, read nothing but the old books which had
always been on our shelves. He said he knew
Draper's "History" and that it was not the sort of
book for me to read at present. I wanted a
different history, with animals as well as men in
it. He had a store of books with him, and would
lend me "The Origin of Species" to begin with.
When I read and returned the book, and he was
eager to hear my opinion, I said it had not hurt
me in the least, since Darwin had, to my mind,
only succeeded in disproving his own theory with
his argument from artificial selection [...] He
advised me to read it again, to read and consider
it carefully with the sole purpose of getting at
the truth.[...]"as a naturalist". I read it again
in the way he had counselled and then refused to
think any more on the subject.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: William Henry Hudson Print: Book
One can say of the more reticent British that, as
you come to know them, some are discovered and
some are found out. My father was of those who
are discovered. 'The Times' came to him
regularly, and he had a small shelf of books
which he read over and over, admitting a newcomer
now and then, after much deliberation. The whole
of George Borrow and of Charles Darwin, Hodson of
Hodson's Horse, Buckle's 'History of
Civilization', White's 'Selborne', Benvenuto
Cellini, and Sismondi's Italian Republics are
what I remember.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Stark Print: Book
