Charles Darwin, finally approaching a publisher with his Origin of Species:
Publisher John Murray, fearing a financial fiasco, had balked at the 500-page manuscript, and initially asked that Darwin cut it down and focus the work on pigeons because “everybody is interested in pigeons.”
From Archaeology magazine. So good I hope it’s true.
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Have you read Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son? It’s a memoir of growing up with a fundamentalist father, and eventually rejecting that faith. Gosse’s father was a respected Victorian naturalist who, naturally, refused to support Darwin when Darwin came to him, before publishing On the Origin of Species, and whose field of research narrowed to a vanishing point as he persisted in his rejection of evolution. The religious practices of the elder Gosse and his small community seem alternately grim and absurd, but the story of the son’s gradual disenchantment is very moving. EG also does a good job of conveying his parents’ love — his mother died when he was young — and the portrait of the father and his complicated relationship with his son is unforgettable.
I’ve not read it, but as they say, science moves forward “one funeral at a time.”