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Late in his life, Charles Darwin looked back with a sense of loss on the intensity of his earlier pleasure in the arts. In his youth, and throughout the voyage of the Beagle and the period when he was forming his theory, he experienced intense aesthetic excitement. Music, literature, paintings and landscape all affected him viscerally; music in particular provoking the ‘backbone shiver’. What did these experiences contribute to Darwin’s thought and where did all that material go? This lecture will explore whether there was simply a void left where the arts had been or whether they found different expression in his creativity and later theories. We shall be looking at extracts from Darwin’s early private notebooks, as well as from The Voyage of the Beagle, alongside The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. 

Professor Dame Gillian Beer is Emeritus King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge and a former President of Clare Hall College, Cambridge. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and holds honorary doctorates from a number of universities including Oxford, London and the Sorbonne. Among her books are Darwin’s Plots (third ed., 2009), Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996) and Virginia Woolf: the Common Ground (1996). She has twice been a judge for the Booker Prize, the second time as Chair, and is President of the British Comparative Literature Association and of the British Society for Literature and Science. Professor Beer is currently completing a study entitled Alice in Space for Chicago University Press and preparing an edition of the complete poems of Lewis Carroll for Penguin Books.