Who we are today is inevitably rooted in our past experiences, readings, interactions, decisions and interests. Influences, in short, continuously mould our present behaviours, actions, thoughts and products. This is commonly accepted about human identity and conduct in the world. However, these influences are sometimes determining enough to help decisively change an entire world view, or constituent parts of it, like the view that a given person, or even an entire generation, has of nature in a given age.

We have all had an influential past, as did Charles Darwin, one of the most decisive historical figures in biocultural evolution, especially in regard to the evolution of the received view of nature. Actually, the view of nature many of us have inherited is a gift – a threat for many others – from Darwin himself, who dedicated his life to the study and unveiling of the hidden, at first sight, mechanism of nature that has brought us, precisely, to the present: natural selection. In fact, it was his never-ending endeavour to delve into the underlying causes of nature that led him to experience a change of insight about nature itself.

But what influences helped stir and develop Darwin's inherited Victorian view of nature? And most importantly, what and who were the most fundamental stimuli and, therefore, the pillars of his theory of evolution? Charles Morris Lansley proposes a threefold, although debatable, answer in his book Charles Darwin's Debt to the Romantics: How Alexander von Humboldt, Goethe and Wordsworth Helped Shape Darwin's View of Nature. As is clearly, possibly too ambitiously, stated in the book's title, Darwin's view of nature was strongly determined by the Romantic movement. Although allusions are made to other leading erudites – Romantic or not – who may also have been referential for Darwin, like, among others, his grandfather Erasmus Darwin (to whom the eighth chapter is dedicated), Thomas Malthus, Percy B. Shelley and Samuel T. Coleridge (to whom the ninth chapter, entitled ‘The Rime of the Ancient Naturalist’, is symbolically dedicated), Alexander von Humboldt, Johann W. von Goethe (were these two savants to be considered genuine Romantics instead of a ‘hybrid’ between Romanticism and naturalism?), and William Wordsworth. These are the key Romantic historical figures on which the author excessively relies, though sometimes not seemingly relying upon a solid argumentative base across the nine chapters that compose the book, to sustain the direct influence of a Romantic past in Darwin's thinking. More precisely, the ‘Humboldtian method’, which helped develop Darwin's Romantic imagination; Goethe's ‘genetic method’, which guided Darwin towards the quest for ‘archetypes’; and Wordsworth's ‘double-consciousness’ narrative, an influence in the development of Darwin's use of the ‘double movement of prose’ (George Levine, Darwin the Writer, 2011), are the three main perceptive, conceptual and descriptive Romantic milestones that Lansley assumes as determining for the progressively developing Darwinian view of nature. Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), On the Origin of Species (1859), Notebooks (1836–1844) and The Descent of Man (1871) constitute the main core texts that Lansley constantly brings into discussion in order to advocate the latent, although apparently perceptible, Humboldtian, Goethean and Wordsworthian Romantic legacies.

Although the book's title promises a balanced relation of influence that these three figures exerted upon Darwin, Humboldt, to whom a great amount of the first three chapters is dedicated, undeniably takes the leading role in Lansley's narration over the first quarter of the book. Humboldt's method of including the influence that nature exerts on the mood of the beholder in his meticulous and detailed analysis of certain types of natural landscapes is apparent in much of Darwin's works – mostly in The Voyage of the Beagle – where two descriptive tendencies, the aesthetic–literary (or even poetic) and the naturalistic, are to be found in a well-proportioned blend. Description of the wonder felt before nature's beauties and a scientific explanation of the landscape are allied in both Humboldt's and Darwin's texts. This dualistic form of narrative, perfectly complementing and intertwining both types of register – definitely a reflection of two forms of approximating and conceiving nature – permitted Humboldt to describe his organic, unitary view of nature – that is, the interrelatedness of all things – and this played, according to Lansley, an important part in the evolution of Darwin's Romantic imagination, for it helped him ‘see’ and grasp the hidden laws of nature.

The Humboldtian heritage of a poetic–aesthetic imaginative thinking in Darwin can actually be perfectly chained to Goethe's ‘genetic method’, explains Lansley mainly in the fourth chapter, used to comprehend the concept of ‘archetype’, for it is the mental capacity to move genealogically backwards and teleologically forwards amid the diverse phases of a certain series of facts or things – different developmental stages of plants, in the case of Goethe – in search of archetypes. Darwin's adopted Humboldtian imaginative–aesthetic thinking, linked to the dynamic Goethean back-and-forth method that Lansley assumes he knew and applied to his research, allegedly cleared the path toward the understanding of nature's development.

In the seventh chapter, Lansley explains that Darwin's imaginative (Humboldtian) and dynamic (Goethean) poetry of science finds, lastly, its optimal way of expression in the ‘double movement of prose’, inspired by Wordsworth's ‘double consciousness’, bonding deductive reasoning and poetic imagination. Wordsworth's endeavour to, on the one hand, recall his mind from the past and, on the other, narrate his present state of consciousness might have inspired Darwin to move from a primal sensation of wonder, passing through explanation, to finally end up in a (generally aesthetically enhanced) renovated sense of wonder.

Lansley's book offers the reader a well-documented, perhaps narratively confusing, account of some of Darwin's Romantic inspirational sources struggling with his Victorian naturalistic stimuli. A not-so-deserved victory, nonetheless, is given to the Romantic influences, thanks to which, Lansley states exaggeratedly, the theory of natural selection could be satisfactorily developed. Even though the influence of Humboldt is a blatant, although well-justified, wildcard when trying to trace Darwin's Romantic origins, both Goethe and Wordsworth's inspirational impact on Darwin is introduced somewhat forcedly.

A counterweighted critical analysis of both Romantic and naturalistic influences in Darwin's thinking could have enriched and brought conviction to Lansley's plot.