In The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins, Devin Griffiths shows how analogical thinking became a central—and necessary—creative tool for nineteenth-century novelists, poets, and science writers. Griffiths begins with two preliminary chapters (labeled “Introduction” and “Prelude”) that set up the argument and define critical terms before embarking on five chapters that explore how analogical thinking developed in the work of five authors. These critical explorations are bookended, as the title suggests, with chapters on Erasmus Darwin and his grandson Charles. Between, Griffiths offers analyses of the historical novels of Walter Scott, Tennyson's In Memoriam A. H. H., and the social realist fiction of George Eliot. As Griffiths builds his argument and examines his literary examples, he, in effect, applies the analogical paradigm he theorized in the opening chapters, generating a compelling set of insights into modes of thought that circulated in the first half of the nineteenth century, some of which continue to shape and define our own times.

Griffiths begins by teasing out the uneasy relationship Charles Darwin had with the legacy of his grandfather and, following other recent critical reevaluations, challenges the traditional view that Charles wholly dismissed his grandfather's evolutionary thinking as vague natterings of little importance to his own thinking. Instead, as Griffiths points out, Erasmus's work was very much on Charles Darwin's mind: he wrote “Zoonomia” (the title of his grandfather's masterwork on biological science) at the head of “Notebook B,” where his ideas on species transformation were first sketched. But the younger Darwin needed a “different approach to the problem of evolution” (1), and, as Griffiths contends, he found it in the “new mode of historical description furnished by contemporary fiction and other imaginative genres” (2). In other words, the development of new modes of imaginative thought in the generation between Erasmus Darwin and his grandson created the narrative space in which Charles Darwin could fully conceive of, theorize, and, most importantly, write the narrative of evolution that his grandfather could only convey glimpses of. The historical turn, exemplified by the novels of Walter Scott, gave Darwin narratological tools to build structures of theory and convey evidence from the historical record in order to demonstrate how evolution by natural selection works in nature. As Griffiths puts it, the historical novel “made it possible to narrate the evolutionary past convincingly” (5). Griffith contends that Scott's new approach to history through the novel ushered in an era of historicism and that his enormously popular novels influenced writing in other disciplines, such as history (see Macaulay, for example) and, as the book contends, science writing. This comparative historicism is central to the way we gather and interpret knowledge in the modern world. Griffiths further contends that comparative historicism superadds a layer of analogy, and in the prelude chapter, where Griffiths lays out his theoretical models, he takes the reader through the differences between comparison and analogy with some interesting discussion of other analogical models, including atomic theory.

Chapter 1, as noted above, considers Erasmus Darwin and positions him as a foundational figure for our modern scientific and technological age. For Griffiths, Darwin's poems—The Botanic Garden (made up of two parts, The Loves of the Plants and The Economy of Vegetation) and The Temple of Nature—may have failed in opening up new poetic aesthetics, but they did create “entirely new avenues of thought” (53). I have made much the same point in my own work, where I trace Darwin's “evolutionary imagination” through the nineteenth century, culminating in the science fiction of H. G. Wells. Whereas Griffith here begins at a similar starting point, he traces a different path that adds another dimension to Erasmus Darwin's influence and legacy. I especially enjoyed Griffiths' reading of The Loves of the Plants because of the connections it anticipates in Griffiths' concluding chapter, where he unpacks Charles Darwin's study of orchids.

In chapter 2 Griffiths focuses on the novels of Scott, fleshing out his influence on the historians, science writers, and literary writers of the next generation “who tried to make sense of the past.” Griffiths offers compelling readings of The Antiquary and Ivanhoe; a discussion of forgery and the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border is also engaging.

In chapter 3 Griffiths explores Tennyson's In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850), where he makes the intriguing argument that Arthur Henry Hallam is, in effect, a spectral collaborator of his own elegy, what Griffith terms the “spooky action” of the poem. For Griffiths, In Memoriam is “constructed as a kind of sounding box, an instrument that allows its dead poetic subject to intervene in the act of poetic composition” (132). In it, Tennyson sought to create “the possibility of a sustained analogy between the living and the dead” (133) and this, according to Griffiths, is harnessed by the poem's enclosed rhyme scheme, what Griffiths calls “a kind of epistemological engine, designed to gather information from both previous experience and new inspiration” (134). Griffiths also considers the concept of the “plurality of worlds” that Tennyson contemplates in In Memoriam, and what especially interested me in this segment was how it illustrates an expanding vision of the cosmos, which, in turn, will later bond with the “deep time” vision of Darwin's evolutionary narrative to increase the broader vistas of human knowledge and understanding.

With chapter 4, Griffiths tackles George Eliot. Here he suggests that Middlemarch (1872) is not so much “interested in science per se but rather in how scientific knowledge can figure more basic problems of epistemology, social understanding, and the texture of history” (171). Here Griffiths seeks to “reconsider the relation between social and natural history in Eliot's writing” (176). Griffiths concludes that although Eliot was skeptical of Darwin's conclusions about species origins, her analogical thinking “insists on an ecological reading of the social world” (205), and that this, in turn, aligns with Darwin's ecological vision in the Origin.

With the final chapter on Charles Darwin, Griffiths nicely brings the reader full circle. He shows how the narrative form of The Origin of Species was shaped by Darwin's reading of fiction, especially the novels of Scott—here Griffiths offers a departure from Gillian Beer, who put greater emphasis on Darwin's reading of Wordsworth and other romantic poets. Griffiths makes the case that the novels Darwin owned and read were part of his “working collection of books” and that they contributed to his scientific researches by creating imaginative spaces and analogies from which he built his theoretical edifices (235). Griffiths goes on to provide a reading of Darwin's 1862 treatise on orchids and argues that there Darwin “used the study of orchids to demonstrate how natural selection would work in the field—articulating a powerful new research paradigm and changing how naturalists would study nature” (237). This takes us back to the elder Darwin's The Loves of the Plants, and Griffiths makes meaningful connections between the botanical interests of Charles Darwin and the work of his grandfather.

Griffiths ends with a brief coda on climate change, which at first may seem like an unnecessary intrusion, but given that climate change is the unavoidable crisis we must face in the coming decades, Griffiths's point that we are facing a “no-analog future” is a necessary intervention and reminds us that Darwin's evolutionary vision does not assume a human future.