"The Age of Reason" was largely ignored after 1820, except by radical groups in Britain and freethinkers in America, such as Robert G. Ingersoll and the American abolitionist Moncure Daniel Conway, who edited his works and wrote the first biography of Paine, favorably reviewed by "The New York Times". Not until the publication of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species" in 1859, and the large-scale abandonment of the literal reading of the Bible that it caused in Britain did many of Paine's ideas take hold. As writer Mark Twain said, "It took a brave man before the Civil War to confess he had read the "Age of Reason"... I read it first when I was a cub pilot, read it with fear and hesitation, but marveling at its fearlessness and wonderful power." Paine's criticisms of the church, the monarchy, and the aristocracy appear most clearly in Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" (1889).