Byron, Darwin, and Paley: Interrogating Natural Theology

Abstract

Some of Byron’s speculations and his attitudes toward the natural world and its formation are remarkably close to many of Charles Darwin’s ideas. Byron may not have influenced Darwin in any very precise, direct sense, although Darwin clearly knew Byron’s poetry quite well and wrote that “up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, gave me great pleasure” (Barlow 158). Darwin went on to say, however, that in his middle age he completely lost his relish for poetry. Thus, critics would have little to gain in searching for direct influences and allusions to Byron in Darwin’s writings. What this essay considers instead is the way in which Byron and Darwin responded to the same stimulus, in the form of an influential author whose work they both read while they were undergraduates at Cambridge—the Reverend William Paley, author of a highly popular and influential work: Natural Theology (1802).