Erasmus Darwin: Sex, Science, and Serendipity

Dr Erasmus Darwin seemed an innocuous Midlands physician, a respectable stalwart of eighteenth-century society. But there was another side to him.

Botanist, physician, Lunar inventor and popular poet, Darwin was internationally renowned for extraordinary poems explaining his theories about sex and science. Yet he became a target for the political classes, the victim of a sustained and vitriolic character assassination by London's most savage satirists.

Intrigued, prize-winning historian Patr...