Darwin, Du Chaillu and Mr Gorilla: the lions of the season

This chapter explores how Charles Darwin’s 1859 book On the Origin of Species and the explorer Paul Du Chaillu’s almost simultaneous encounters with gorillas in West Africa focussed popular fears about evolution. Gorillas were a frightening suggestion that apes and humans were related, and that ancient hominids might still inhabit the unexplored parts of the Earth. Scientists and theologians publicly and angrily confronted each other, providing satirists with the basis for cartoons, songs, plays, stage sketches, acrobatic routines and literary fantasies about gorillas. These reflected a generalised knowledge about evolution. Cartoons, poems and jokes in humorous magazines adopted the gorilla’s voice, making the animal quasi-human and having it comment directly on the contemporary world. The almost invariably humorous tone in which gorillas were invoked in British popular culture deflected unease about the animal’s relationship to humans. Such ideas were far more threatening in the United States, where debates about the future of slavery were plunging the country into Civil War. Americans had little interest in comic depictions of simian prehistoric humans.