The Evolution of Inanimate Objects by Harry Karlinsky Reviewed
by David Hebblethwaite 24 October 2012 Psychiatrist Harry
Karlinsky was researching the history of Canadian asylums when
he came across records of a young man named Thomas Darwin being
admitted to an asylum in London, Ontario in 1879—and dying there
of tuberculosis later that year, aged twenty-one. The
coincidence of Thomas Darwin's surname and birthplace (the
English village of Down) caught Karlinsky's attention; further
research revealed that this Thomas was indeed the eleventh and
youngest child of Charles and Emma Darwin. In The Evolution of
Inanimate Objects, Karlinsky presents a biography of the
previously-neglected Thomas Darwin and collects his writings, in
which Thomas applied his father's theories to the development of
cutlery and other everyday items. Well, not quite. Harry
Karlinsky is a professor of psychiatry, but Thomas Darwin never
existed, and The Evolution of Inanimate Objects is a novel. Yet
it's a novel made to look very much l