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Before the Origin was published , had there been a consensus of opinion, or was there allready a debate raging?

There certainly have been debates for a great many years about the degree to which species might have changed or might have been introduced at different times. Most of those ideas tended to go back to the idea that there was an originating creator who might have intervened or that things turned up, that was the looser form of it.
When you get back as far as somebody like Pailey, he uses the argument that you couldn't possibly have a watch without a designer so that by analogy, you can't have a process of evolution without a design.

There were people who had been arguing very much against this. For instance, The anonymous Vestiges of Creation, which was one of the great popular successes of the late 1840s, was also rubbished by scientists and by others because, one thing was that it was anonymous so nobody knew if this was by a scientist or not, the other really I think was because the process it described was a process in which little fragments were left over from some initial full vision, and this was a very unsatisfying way of thinking about the present.
Another reason it came to be seen as inadequate, and I think that Darwin saw it as inadequate, was that it tended to think in terms of an upward movement with humankind inevitably as the end product. That is it was still based in the idea of a plan that would put man, and I say man deliberately, because that was certainly not only the language,  but the implication at the centre of significance.

So, to that degree, I think, yes, there were already a lot of people arguing, there had been ideas about what were called developmentalism, but what Darwin did was to bring in one completely new and important idea, which was the procedure or the process by which these changes over millenia, aeons, had taken place, and his argument that the process was natural selection - and that was his naming of it - was, I think, a bold new idea.

The theory was always problematic, though, wasn't it?

It had in it all sorts of problems,  of course, because as soon as you say selection you get back to the same Pailian question of ok, so, "if selection then who's the selector? Who or what is doing the selecting?"

And that was a problem in the language that Darwin was obliged to use because there wasn't a prepared language which ran along the seam of what he wanted to say. Indeed, most of the dominant discussion at the time, I think one could fairly say, had come out of natural theology - that is it assumed questions like creation and design as being part of a  benignly ordered universe, and Darwin's is a much darker, less ordered - well, one of his enemies said that it was 'the law of higgledy-piggledy'.

The question of extinction is particularly...

I think the other thing that his theory necessitated, and it's still an idea that we find very hard to cope with, is that extinction is as fundamental as is new developement in evolutionary process.
We all fight against the idea of species becoming extinct and an enormous and proper effort is put into sustaining now rare species, but if one reads with a sort of hard head what Darwin is saying he simply says 'this is how life goes' and that almost none of the past species of the world are still current, and certainly none of those now current are likely to survive into the distant future, including, of course, although he never annunciates this, human kind. 

That's what people object to, isn't it, that we are subject to the same doom as all those other things.

Yes,and that's where he differed from Wallace, because as we all now know it's something that interests people very much -  that Alfred Russell Wallace, like Darwin, had this sudden insight, though he actually had it about 20 years later than Darwin, that it must be this process of according with your own environment, with your current environment, that gave the possibility of having progeny, those progeny surviving, and moving into future forms.
But what he couldn't accept was that humankind was subject to all the same laws as all other forms of life. He wanted to find an explanation for soul, and so if you're going to sustain the idea of soul you have got to find some kind of differentiation which will mean that human beings run across different laws from every other species.

And I think Wallace is a very admirable and imaginative worker and in some ways I think his later life is a marvellous attempt to cope with that… that he becomes a devoted socialist, he also becomes a devoted spiritualist, but he is driven, certainly in spiritualism, to find some way out because of his insistence that he's got to hold on to the idea that humankind is subject to different laws and has this special feature called soul.
Now Darwin, very quietly, was able to do away with, or to do without, that distinction, and of course that's why his theory is so much more disquieting than Wallace's - and remains so, I think.

Was it that the theories of The Origin were contradictory to previous beliefs that were extremely powerful and hard to shift?

I think Darwin himself found it quiete hard to let go of certain theistic assumptions - that is assumptions that there is a central organising process, for example the way in which he always talks about the single progenitor. And some people in the ten years after he publishes The Origin, including GH Lewis's, said, well why does he imagine that there's got to be a single place from which we all came. Why could there not have been this chemical process going on all over the world at the same time?

And they saw, I think quite astutely, that this was partly because the habits of mind are so strong that we all live in, in any particular era and the habit of mind of having as it were an iniciating point or being, that Darwin… I wouldn't like to adjudicate on whether that now is taken to be the fact. I mean now people say that humankind came out of Africa, for instance,
But nevertheless there is that worry for him: how to make room for some kind of organising principle, even while he was emphasising the chancey, the random, the mutational, and the fact that as sexed beings our energies go towards differientiation - in that we are very different to our species and a number of the primates from the kinds of species that split ar replicate or have virgin birth and which therefore always reproduce the parent type. What's striking and even anomalous about our species, and a group of species like ours, is that we tend recklessly towards individuation, and that does mean that you get quite rapid diversification. 

So Darwin is saying you can't tell what is going to happen in the future, there are just too many pathways, just too many, who knows? And that's quite an eerie thought, so unteleological, so unplanned. And, of course, again he tries to give it a more benign shape, I think, when he talks about it as natural selection as opposed to artificial selection, which is, as he sees it, the manmade selection, the artificial selection which is like what farmers do, what pigeon fanciers do, what plant-rearers do. That is, to do things for the benefit of mankind - not for the benefit of those particular plants or animals, and that he calls artificial selection, artifice.

Whereas natural selection, he says, is always for the benefit of the kind itself. That is that it produces better, more prepared, more advanced - and this is where he does move onto shakey ground because in one of his notebooks he says 'never say higher and lower about species,' but in The Origin, as a kind of comfort speak, I think he sometimes does move into suggesting that we are all moving onwards and upwards.

Unusually the book was read widely, not just by scientists.  Why was this?

The Origin Of Species was quite extraordinarily popular. Now Darwin of course himself had tried to write it as if not as a popular book then certainly as a book that used ordinary language, that didn't use a rhetoric which was only available to scientists, and he saw it as really just a summary of the enormous book he had been struggling to write over about 20 years which is now called the Big Book which he never finished, because once Wallace had made it clear that he had had the same fundamental ideas as Darwin about natural selection, Darwin had to rush to write his version - and it took him 13 months and he simply sat at it.

So why was it so immediately successful? Well I've already suggested that Vestiges of Creation had, if not prepared the ground exactly for this had made people very interested in this topic. But I think there was another reason which goes back further, which is let's remember that the Voyage of the Beagle, as we now call it , was also extremely popular and that when that was pirated at the end of the 1830s and then went into a second edition, this book made Darwin's name: it was that book that made Darwin's name. 

This I think is not sufficiently understood when people say "Well why did everybody rush to read this, not just scientists but people more broadly?" it was partly because Darwin was a very well-known travel writer who had written this marvelously stimulating and sensorarily rich book in his youth and then had written a number of much more technical treatises since about cirripedes and things like that - so now he was going to do this Big Book.

Meanwhile, within the discussions among scientists thought had moved on, and Darwin himself had been corresponding with Henslow, who had been his mentor at Cambridge, and with Lyle, who had also been another one of his great mentors, and with other influential friends so that it wasn't that it broke onto the world without any other scientist being aware of what was going on in Darwin's mind. He had been preparing the ground.

What effect did the public reaction have?

Well it's certainly striking that it sold out within really a few days, the very first one, and that he produced a second edition six weeks later which we would probably now call almost a reprinting though it does, strikingly, in the second edition he re-introduces the idea of the creator. So he has already had that very first impact of the way in which people respond and perhaps been alarmed by it and decided that, well, he could just for the time being as it were reintroduce the idea of the creator. 
He does it right at the end. "There is granduer in this view of life with its several powers having being originally breathed by the creator into a few forms or into one." By the third edition he takes out again "by the creator" and that kind of argument that is going on in his own representation of his theory I think is one of the things that makes it part of the general cultural argument of the time.

I don't think that he is actually uncertain - except of course let us remember that Darwin said that he was not writing about the origin of life, he was writing about the process of differentiation by which species came into being. And when people say he said that at the start this is what happened,  that's not quite true. He quite deliberately leaves aside the question of the origin of life.
So these are some of the ways in which I feel that he spoke to a much larger public, and then let's remember the other person who is  crucial to the process of dissemination which is Huxley.  Wheras Darwin was a rather diffident  person in terms of confrontation, he didn't like that, Huxley really enjoyed it and that's why he becomes Darwin's bulldog - he's the person who goes out into the arena of public debate, and it's he who brings in the challenge by re-introducing the question of mankind: where does humankind stand in all this?

Darwin, as he put it diplomatically, eschewed any discussion really of human beings in The Origin and he thought that by doing that he was making it less controversial, he would always talk about the higher species, something like that. Only in the conclusion where he says he sees open fields for further enquiry and the psychology of man, that's where mankind gets back in. But Huxley writes man's place in nature, which is all about these questions of where humankind fits into the natural world, 1863, so four years after The Origin it's straight back in there.

Is there a common misunderstanding today that it's not about species but about The Species, about humanity?

I think there's still a big gap between people who work, say, in genetics for whom this theory is fundamental and can be taken for granted -that is, the process of natural selection in producing differentiation.
And we have to remember that Darwin was writing The Origin before there was a language for genetics, so that he himself is deeply puzzled and can't find satisfactory solutions. He comes up with this idea that he calls "gemules", which was an attempt to describe how characteristics are carried from generation to generation but that's long since been abandoned. Nevertheless, with the development of genetics in the 20th century it seems to be an incontestable and crucial tool for interpretation for scientists working in these fields and that all their results seem to confirm the propriety, the rightness of this interpretation.  

But for most people I think it is partly that the word evolution is a word that has become current in so many different fields and can tell so many different stories, and one sees that from the start with Darwin's own work that it can be a story about the rise of humanity or the fall of humanity, it can be something that privileges socialism or Nazism, unhappily. It can be used politically in so many diverse ways.
It also has had some very curious cross-fertilizations. For a long time there was this idea that music, for instance, became more complex and therefore better, and the early music movement of the last 20-30 years has been an attempt to move back from that misappropriation of the  idea of evolution as implying always bettering.  And one sees this over and over again, the evolution of tax law - the word is all over the place. 

So I think people are quite understandably very confused about what in fact evolution signifies because it has come to signify so many things, and on the whole I suppose it signifies a process and for a lot of people a process of making things more complex and making better. I think one can certainly say that in a number of instances Darwin thought it made more complex, though he was careful to say that it need not do so as there are some  forms that are very simple and that have survived in their simplicity.

What it doesn't guarantee is betterment, and that I think is still the troubling thought - to have complexity without plan is a very troubling thought. And to have a process of greater and greater complexification without anybody or anything overseeing it… it's the same sort of thing that people now find very worrying about the internet, that there isn't a central being or place that you can go to to ask for something to be put right. And that sense that things can't be censored in the evolutionary  process, not in natural evolution, natural selection.
Of course human beings can intervene and can either sustain or damage the environment as we see currently very strongly but probably the effects of our sustaining or damaging are relatively slighter than we would wish to think.