Although no longer living at Underhill Farm, Fowles still resides in Lyme Regis, where he acted as curate for the town’s local history museum in the 1980s.
Evolutionary thinking and the crisis of faith. The pursuit of science was crucial to Victorian intellectual culture and industrial development, but posed difficult challenges to Christian descriptions of the world, its origins, and humanity’s place within it. In particular, developments in geology and biology led many to question the Biblical account of the world’s creation and, along with it, traditional Christianity. Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875) published his Principles of Geology (3 volumes) between 1830 and 1833, which demonstrated that the earth was millions of years old rather than thousands, and that the world itself had changed over long periods of time as the result of processes like erosion. Biologist Charles Darwin (1809-82), working in part from Lyell’s research on fossils, published the theory of natural selection in his watershed book, On the Origin of Species (also in WLAIT 4: British and Irish Literature and Its Times) in 1859.
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