Reception
Hardly known outside academic theological circles today, Essays sold 22,000 copies in two years, more than Origin sold in its first twenty years. It sparked five years of increasingly polarized debate with books and pamphlets furiously contesting the issues.
A review by Frederic Harrison published in the Westminster Review in October 1860 had the probably undesired effect of stimulating the attack on the book. Harrison saw the essays as neither religious nor rational which was a double blow to the seven who saw the essays as promoting rational religion.
In January 1861, an anonymous review was published in the Quarterly Review. The author was later revealed as Samuel Wilberforce Bishop of Oxford. The Quarterly review was followed up by a letter to The Times co-signed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and 25 bishops which threatened the theologians with the ecclesiastical courts. Darwin quoted a proverb: "A bench of bishops is the devil's flower garden", and joined others including the eminent geologist Charles Lyell, and the mathematician and Queen's printer William Spottiswoode, in signing a counter-letter supporting Essays and Reviews for trying to "establish religious teachings on a firmer and broader foundation".
On the subject Lewis Carroll wrote, "Let E = Essays, and R = Reviews: then the locus of (E + R), referred to multilinear coördinates, will be found to be a superficies (i.e., a locus possessing length and breadth, but no depth)."
Read more about this topic: Essays And Reviews
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)