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Libby started the topic Writing for the market in the forum Blogs 3 years, 8 months ago
From Homing: on pigeons, dwellings and why we return by Jon Day. It’s my current read.
“One of the readers for Darwin’s publisher of On the Origin of Species, a clergyman named Whitwell Elwin, called the book ‘a wild & foolish piece of imagination, for an outline it is too much & for a thorough discussion of the question it is not near enough.’ Rather than rejecting the book, however, he advised Darwin to cut everything in it that wasn’t to do with pigeons. ‘Everybody is interested in pigeons,’ he said, and such a book would ‘be reviewed in every journal in the kingdom and soon be on every table.'”
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I’ve seen a few instances where great works have had poor or strange reviews, but that must be one of the funniest.
And isn’t Whitwell Elwin a great name for a Victorian clergyman? Or any Victorian man for that matter.
He could have been named especially for the job.