Profound intellectual changes affected life, literature, and theatre.
In politics,
there were political upheavals, rebellions, and the writings of Karl Marx that questioned the status quo.
The social
world, Comte applied the scientific method in the study of society and in writing literary criticism.
In science,
the world turned upside down upon the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species in 1859.
The question
of what is man, a product of environment or of heredity was raised.