‘Everybody nowadays talks about evolution’, observed Grant Allen in 1888. The all-pervasive subject, he opined, ‘is “in the air” … it infects small-talk with its familiar catchwords and slang phrases' (p. 286). Historians who are not paid-up members of the so-called ‘Darwin industry’ might crack a wry smile and reflect that Allen's complaints apply to modern academic publishing no less than to the popular culture of the 1880s. There are, after all, already two recent books with almost identical titles to Bernard Lightman and Bennett Zon's Evolution and Victorian Culture: Martin Fichman's Evolutionary Theory and Victorian Culture (2002) and Jonathan Conlin's Evolution and the Victorians: Science, Culture and Politics in Darwin's Britain (2014). Lightman and Zon's excellent collection of essays, however, makes a distinctive and very valuable contribution to this crowded field in two particular ways.

First, it explores an extremely broad canvas of cultural forms, with a clear emphasis on the visual, aural, performative and spatial rather than the just the textual. So, while the two opening chapters, by Cannon Schmitt and John Holmes, deal, respectively, with the relatively conventional topics of evolution and the novel and poetry, the remainder of the volume is composed of essays evidently inflected by the ‘visual turn’ (p. 95) and ‘spatial turn’ (p. 253) of recent historical scholarship, as well as adding new turns towards performance and sound. All of the contributors are extremely well chosen to represent their respective areas. In addition to those of Schmitt and Holmes, there are chapters by Elizabeth Edwards on photography, Oliver Gaycken on early cinema, Barbara Larson on art, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr on theatre, Theresa Jill Buckland on dance, Zon on music, Carla Yanni on architecture and Sadiah Qureshi on exhibitions. Lightman concludes the volume with an incisive overview of Victorian attempts to popularize evolution. Helpfully, the chapters all analyse the extant scholarship on their respective topics, as well as adding new historical detail and offering thoughts on future directions in the subject.

Second, and no less importantly, Lightman and Zon's volume also takes account of the many different conceptions of evolution that had cultural currency during the Victorian period, from the imported Lamarckianism of the 1830s, and the saltational transmutationism of the best-selling Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), to the unappealing randomness of Darwin's natural and sexual selection, and the more appetizing (to the Victorians) teleological versions of progressive development offered by Herbert Spencer. The welcome scrupulousness of the editors and contributors in going beyond just Darwinian evolution is, inevitably, informed by Peter Bowler's long-standing endeavour to recalibrate the nature of Darwin's actual influence in the nineteenth century in books such as The Non-Darwinian Revolution (1988) and Darwin Deleted (2013). In these seminal works, Bowler occasionally alludes to late Victorian writers including George Bernard Shaw or Samuel Butler, whose plays and novels articulated neo-Lamarckian forms of evolution that allowed for the expression of individual will and moral purpose, although such cultural manifestations of evolutionary teleology remain largely tangential to his main arguments. In fact, as Lightman and Zon note in their introduction, ‘while Bowler's contribution is significant in the history of Victorian science, his and other non-Darwinian theories have never been adequately tested in the larger plurality of Victorian cultural activity’ (pp. 8–9). Evolution and Victorian Culture, they propose, is the ‘first book to do this' (p. 9). In so doing, the eleven chapters in the volume lend massive support to Bowler's principal thesis regarding the widespread acceptance of evolution in Victorian Britain but general rejection of Darwin's own specific mechanism of natural selection. The evolution that was presented to the audiences of tawdry music halls in east London or the art galleries of fashionable Mayfair, in the flickering images on early cinema screens or embodied in new architectural styles, rarely bore any relation to what the twentieth or twenty-first centuries would recognize as Darwinism.

Interestingly, it was in the textual forms of the novel and poetry – with which the volume begins – that a more identifiably Darwinian form of evolution seems to have had more sway, with Schmitt contending that the ‘import of specifically Darwinian evolutionary theory for Victorian fiction is far from being exhaustively understood’ (p. 25). With most previous scholarship on nineteenth-century culture's engagement with evolution having focused on textual rather than visual, aural, performative or spatial cultural forms, this might provide a reason why Darwin has continued to loom so large in studies of Victorian culture despite the historical revisionism that Bowler has pursued since the 1980s. The considerably broader cultural canvas surveyed in Evolution and Victorian Culture defiantly refuses such ‘Darwin-o-centrism’ as Paul White has recently termed it (‘Science, literature, and the Darwin legacy’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (2010) 11, p. 3), and will instead force scholars who have previously cleaved to the hoary old trope of the Darwinian Revolution to recognize the enormous diversity of Victorian approaches to evolution.