Elizabeth Reid, Lady Hope, née Cotton[1] (9 December 1842–8 March 1922) was a British evangelist who claimed in 1915 to have visited the British naturalist Charles Darwin shortly before his death in 1882, during which interview Hope claimed Darwin had had second thoughts about publicizing the theory of evolution.
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Elizabeth Cotton was born in 1842 in Tasmania, Australia, the daughter of a British general, General Sir Arthur Cotton. In 1877, at the age of 35, she married a widower, retired Admiral Sir James Hope, who was 34 years her senior, thereby becoming Lady Hope of Carriden. Sir James died four years later.
During the early 1880s, Lady Hope and her father were part of the evangelistic temperance movement and lived in Beckenham, Kent about 6 miles from Downe, home of Charles Darwin.
In 1893, Lady Hope married T. A. Denny, an Irish businessman 24 years her senior, although she continued to use the name "Lady Hope." Denny died in 1909. In 1915, 33 years after Darwin's death, Hope told her story about him at a Bible conference in Northfield, Massachusetts. In 1922, Hope died of breast cancer in Sydney, Australia, where she is buried.
The Lady Hope Story first appeared in an American Baptist newspaper, the Watchman-Examiner, on 15 August 1915, preceded by a four-page report on a summer Bible conference held in Northfield, which that year ran from 30 July to 15 August 1915.[2]
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Everyone in Darwin's family denied the validity of the story. In 1918, Darwin's son Francis wrote that "Lady Hope's account of my father's views on religion is quite untrue. I have publicly accused her of falsehood, but have not seen any reply. My father's agnostic point of view is given in my Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. I., pp. 304–317. You are at liberty to publish the above statement. Indeed, I shall be glad if you will do so." In 1922, Darwin's daughter, Henrietta Litchfield, said she did not believe Lady Hope had ever seen her father and that "he never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier. We think the story of his conversion was fabricated in the U.S.A."[3]
Lady Hope gave her own slightly different account in a letter (circa 1919-20) to S. J. Bole, author of Battlefield of Faith (1940).[4]
The story became a popular legend, and the claims were republished as late as October 1955 in the Reformation Review and in the Monthly Record of the Free Church of Scotland in February 1957.
There has been subsequent academic investigation into the story. Ronald W. Clark's The Survival of Charles Darwin explained the story but did not go into much detail. In 1994 Open University lecturer and biographer James Moore published The Darwin Legend, which claimed that Hope had visited Darwin sometime between 28 September and 2 October 1881, when Francis and Henrietta were absent and Charles' wife Emma was present, but that Hope subsequently embellished the story. Moore outlined his assessment in Darwin — A 'Devil’s Chaplain'? of 2005.[5] Paul Marston's article gives a different analysis, but generally supports this conclusion. He draws attention to discrepancies between the 1915 article and Lady Hope's later letter, which more plausibly has Darwin lying on a sofa rather than being in bed, and does not include the suggestion that Darwin was "always studying" the Bible.
Although the Lady Hope story has been used by a few modern creationists—including Boniface Adoyo, Chairman of the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya[6]—one of the most influential creationist organizations, Answers in Genesis, has strongly debunked the legend.[7]