The book attracted enormous attention, much of it admiring. It was the best of times and the worst of times for Charles Darwin. George Eliot published Adam Bede and Charles Dickens produced A Tale of Two Cities. Samuel Smiles delivered Self Help, a classic in a genre that has kept publishing houses alive ever since. John Stuart Mill wrote his mighty work On Liberty. Alfred Lord Tennyson printed the first Idylls of the King, his long cycle of Arthurian poems. Origin was the book of the year - perhaps the book of the century - but it faced some stiff competition in 1859. The book was hailed, applauded, challenged, questioned, condemned, cruelly dismissed and, rather astonishingly, ignored: the president of the Geological Society of London in 1859 managed to give Darwin a medal of honour for his geological observations in the Andes and his stunning four-volume study on barnacles, without mentioning his seminal paper with Alfred Russel Wallace, or the forthcoming book. Much of the hostility and alarm came not overtly from religion, but from within science.
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