It was a motley collection, these social Darwinists, and Mr Hermans has enough on his plate to find the common denominator. The risk appears of a portrait gallery of eminent Victorians, however ably painted; therefore the author at regular intervals takes up stock to determine what can really be called social Darwinistic. (…) Mr Hermans makes us notice a number of important personalities, with their theories, who for a long time have been in everyone’s black book.

Historian Cor Hermans has written a fascinating and highly readable, though rather sizeable, book on social Darwinian thought as it developed from the second half of the nineteenth century onward, mainly under the influence of the work of Darwin himself.