 On the level of popular culture, Darwin’s theory fell into a complex social situation that took on different features in different national traditions. In the anglophone world, the great popularity of the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation of 1844, which had reached 11 editions and sold 23,350 copies by December of 1860 (Secord “Introduction” to Chambers 1844 reprint [1994: xxvii]), with several more editions to appear by the end of the century, certainly prepared the groundwork for the general notion of the evolutionary origins of species by natural law. The Vestiges’s grand schema of a teleological development of life from the earliest beginnings of the solar system in a gaseous nebula to the emergence of humanity under the action of a great “law of development”, had also been popularized for Victorian readers by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s epic poem In Memoriam (1850). This provided a context in which some could read Darwin as supplying additional support for the belief in an optimistic historical development of life under teleological guidance with the promise of ultimate historical redemption. Such readings also rendered the Origin seemingly compatible with the progressive evolutionism of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903; see the entry on  Herbert Spencer).  Spencer’s writings have been shown to be an important vehicle by which Darwin’s views, modified to fit the progressivist views expounded by Spencer, were first introduced in non-Western contexts (Jin 2019a,b; Yang 2013; Lightman [ed.] 2015; Pusey 1983; Elshakry 2013) Most of this popular reception ignored or revised Darwin’s concept of evolution by natural selection to fit these progressivist alternatives (Bowler 1983). The popular image often depicted of a great public outcry against Darwin’s work has been shown by careful historical analysis to be generally mythical, or at least in need of careful discrimination by social group, national tradition, and religious affiliation (Bowler 2013a; Ellegård 1958).