Reviews and Awards
"Dixon's comprehensive study is to be welcomed as a major contribution to our understanding of the subject....The structure of the book is elegantly simple, and makes what might have been an intricate work highly readable and surprisingly easily navigable."--Stuart Jones, Reviews in History
"Well-argued and compelling."--Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, American Historical Review
"The Invention of Altruism is extremely useful, illuminating not just the spread of the terminology of altruism, its paradoxes and ambiguities and the several concepts understood by different groups to be contained within it, but also the broader intellectual contexts of the late-nineteenth century."--Mark Blacklock, Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
"[This] superb volume...constitutes a powerful re-reading of mid and late Victorian thought....Imaginatively researched, carefully argued and finely written, this is a volume which scholars from a variety of disciplines will be able to engage, contest and build upon."--British Journal for the History of Science
"The Invention of Altruism is ambitious in scope, and full of suggestive discussion of important themes."--Jose Harris, London Review of Books
"Dixon's comprehensive study is to be welcomed as a major contribution to our understanding of the subject....The structure of the book is elegantly simple, and makes what might have been an intricate work highly readable and surprisingly easily navigable."--Stuart Jones, Reviews in History
"Thomas Dixon has written a remarkable histor....His superb volume...is the single best study of the emergence of new moral and social terminology in the Victorian age....Imaginatively researched, carefully argued and finely written, this is a volume which scholars from a variety of disciplines will be able to engage, contest and build upon."--Frank M. Turner, British Journal for the History of Science
"Subtle, broad-ranging, and elegant...a compelling new interpretation of the intertwined histories of moral philosophy, natural science, and religious thought."--Victorian Studies