To John Murray   18 October 1874

Down, | Beckenham, Kent.

Oct. 18th 74

My dear Sir

I am much obliged to you for having sent me the Quarterly. The rejoinder is a fine specimen of words having been used in a Pickwickian sense.1 I am thoroughily convinced by striking coincidences of style & most unusual expressions that Mr Mivart is the author of the calumnious attack on my case, &, as usual, of gross misrepresentations of my words.2

I am therefore not now surprised at any amount of malice in the article, though I was surprised before. It has been a satisfaction to me to discover that there are not two men of science, only one, so regardless of truth as is Mr. Mivart.

My dear Sir | Yours sincerely | Ch. Darwin

1
CD refers to the October 1874 issue of the Quarterly Review (137: 587–9), in which George Howard Darwin defended himself against misrepresentation of views expressed in his essay on marriage (G. H. Darwin 1873a). The misrepresentations were in St George Jackson Mivart’s anonymous review of works by John Lubbock and Edward Burnett Tylor ([Mivart] 1874; see letter from G. H. Darwin, 6 [August] 1874 and n. 3, and letter from John Murray, 12 August 1874). A rejoinder from the reviewer appeared after the letter. In the novel Pickwick papers (Dickens 1837), Mr Blotton of the Pickwick Club called Mr Pickwick a humbug; when challenged by the chairman to explain whether he meant the expression in the common sense, he denied it, and said he meant it in its Pickwickian sense.
2
Mivart had also reviewed Descent for the Quarterly Review ([Mivart] 1871b), and had previously written on the theory of natural selection for the Month, a Catholic journal ([Mivart] 1869).

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

1.1 rejoinder] after del ‘j’
2.1 now] interl

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-9685,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-9685