Arabella B. Buckley / Arabella BBuckley
Arabella Burton Buckley (24 October 1840 - 9 February 1929) was a writer and science educator. She championed Darwinian evolution with particular emphasis on the mind and morals, in contrast to the prevailing emphasis on competition and physical survival. Charles Darwin described her as being able to ’treat evolution with much dexterity and truthfulness’. Arabella Buckley’s writing was predominantly aimed at children and young people, but was popular and greatly respected by all ages. She communicated science through enchantment and metaphorical language that was attractive to younger readers. Like many writers in her time, she was trying to distance science from the mechanistic and materialistic philosophies it was sometimes connected to, and promoted it in moralistic terms: learning is presented as a means to become not only knowledgeable, but morally good.
