Charles Darwin

by A. N. Wilson

  2

  The Old Hat

  CHARLES DARWIN, BORN 12 February 1809 at The Mount, Shrewsbury, was a war baby. When he came into the world, as the child of a very prosperous doctor-cum-banker, Britain had been at war with France over fifteen years. For the previous fifteen months, since Napoleon’s issue of the Milan Decrees, there had been an effectual ban on products coming directly from Britain into the continent. Goods which were known to have come from Britain were confiscated at the European ports. There was a food blockade. British trade was at an all-time low. Imports of raw materials and of food had dropped disastrously. In the months before Darwin’s birth – the last quarter of 1808 – grain imports fell to one-twentieth of the previous year. There was widespread industrial disquiet. In Manchester, there were frequent and violent strikes.1 Wages fell. There was real hunger, and the fear of actual starvation. The population of Britain had risen sharply and now stood at around ten and a half million – compared with seven million in 1760. No wonder in these totally abnormal circumstances that the Revd T. R. Malthus, whose writings were to have so profound an influence upon Darwin, believed that the fight for food was the key to economic history, and that when the limited food supply ran out, the population would eliminate itself by violent struggle or starvation.

  Malthus was not alone in fearing that the British population might starve. Way back in 1798, when the war with France had lasted only five years, the Prime Minister, William Pitt, had established the Board of Agriculture. Its prime object was to increase food production.2 On the whole, during the eighteenth century, artificial stock improvement in Britain had been unknown, except among horse-breeders. An exception had been Robert Bakewell (1725–95) of Dishley Grange, near Loughborough in Leicestershire, who had used techniques followed by the breeders of racehorses to improve farmstock. He began with the Leicester breed of sheep and the Longhorn breed of cattle. He realized that by careful selection of the progeny of favoured animals, a breed could be changed dramatically. Long-woolled sheep from Leicestershire and Lincolnshire were London’s chief source of mutton. Bakewell’s New Leicesters were bred to build up fat deposits while bone and muscle were still developing, and they were ready for the butchers a full year younger than their predecessors. Bakewell’s methods were followed by beef farmers, starting with Herefords. (The Aberdeen Angus was a later development first shown in the 1820s. The Ayrshire was a cross between local and imported cattle, and first recognized as a breed in 1814. Herefords had been pioneered since the 1720s and in the 1870s would be the major bull for export to the American market.3) In the middle of the eighteenth century, there were only two types of native domestic pig in Britain. The importing of Asian pigs in the middle of the century literally saved Britain’s bacon during the French wars, leading to the development of modern breeds such as the Berkshire and the Saddleback. (The Tamworth was imported from Barbados. Gloucester Old Spot was an artificial hybrid.)4

  Even as the baby Darwin lay in his cradle, then, Britain, in the highly artificial conditions of the Napoleonic blockade, was learning to feed itself by processes of highly artificial hybrid selection. As things turned out, Malthus’s prediction of a struggle for survival, followed by cataclysm, could not have been less accurate. Instead of blind struggle, there was ingenuity; instead of selfish grab, there was co-operation; with an increase in population, there actually followed an increase of food.

  Gloucester Old Spot pigs were not the only triumphant result of ingenious breeding. The upper-middle classes, to which Darwin and his family belonged, had recently emerged as a unique British hybrid. Quite as much as the occasional periods of hunger in France, it was the rigidity of the French system, the inflexibility of aristocratic privilege, which had fired the Revolution. In Britain, the bourgeoisie, the professional classes and the emergent merchant and manufacturing classes were united: partly by innumerable strands of interrelation and marriage, partly by shared money-interest, partly by (broadly speaking) shared values. Although, in origin, they came from a variety of classes – including the humblest – they were united by cleverness. ‘Thus they gradually spread over the length and breadth of English intellectual life, criticizing the assumption of the ruling class above them and forming the opinions of the upper middle class to which they belonged. They were the leaders of the new intelligentsia.’5 As Noel Annan, one of the most astute observers of this species noted, ‘they all regarded themselves as gentlemen’; they devoted themselves, during the 1860s – that is, in the decade immediately following Darwin’s Origin of Species – to two great aims: intellectual freedom in the universities and ‘the creation of a public service open to talent’. They ruled Britain, in effect, from the 1850s until the 1950s. Writing in 1953, Osbert Lancaster, who belonged to this class himself, reflected upon the fact that the other classes – the aristocracy, the landed gentry, the lower-middle and working classes – had all survived the twentieth-century convulsions of two world wars and social revolution. The casualty had been the class who possessed the huge houses in Kensington and Notting Hill in London.6 His analysis of the class – which was on the whole London based – repays scrutiny, but one point, for those of us who live after the demise of the species, needs underlining.

  In Victorian times writers and artists, save one or two of the most exalted, living remote and inaccessible on private Sinais in the Isle of Wight or Cheyne Row, had conformed to the pattern of the upper-middle-class to which most of them belonged. Matthew Arnold, Browning, Millais were all indistinguishable in appearance and behaviour from the great army of Victorian clubmen, and took very good care that this should be so. The haute Bohème did not exist and the Athenaeum rather than the Closerie des Lilas shaped the social life of the literary world.7

  The Athenaeum is one of the London clubs. If you enter it today, you will find a large portrait of Charles Darwin hanging over the bar. It is hard to explain the importance of ‘clubland’ in Victorian London to a generation of the twenty-first century for whom clubs, if they impinge at all on the consciousness, are merely places to have a bit of lunch or dinner.8 In Victorian England, they were places where political life – to left and to right – was discussed and forged; where chaps – for they were male preserves – decided who should be the next Regius Professor of Greek, the next Bishop of Bath and Wells, the next Chancellor of the Exchequer. In short, they were places which changed human destinies. Darwin grew up to become – in his own estimation, in legend and to a certain extent in reality – a recluse. He was also a clubman. His membership of the Athenaeum – and his exclusion from the Athenaeum of those who did not accept his ideas – mattered to him. The Athenaeum, as its names implies, was an intellectual place. Bishops, university professors, poets, the higher journalists could mingle here. When Osbert Lancaster said that the Athenaeum shaped the literary world, he could also have added the scientific world.

  Though politically a Liberal, Darwin was profoundly a small-c conservative, and much of his life-story is incomprehensible unless the twenty-first-century reader is acclimatized to the fact. Outside this enclosed family grouping, and this relatively new class-stockade, Darwin’s story could not have happened.

  Charles Darwin was the fifth of six children. (There were two boys and four girls.) Their grandfather Erasmus Darwin was not merely a sought-after physician. He was also an inventor. Addicted to ever-faster travel, he invented a steering mechanism for his phaeton which, in essence, is still used in motorcars. Heaving his vast bulk into his phaeton, Dr Erasmus would whizz round from patient to patient, his lecherous hands happily exploring the bodies of female clients while his mind buzzed, not only with technological invention, but also with speculative thought of a truly revolutionary colouring.

  After two marriages, many dalliances and umpteen children, this vast, stammering, prodigy of a man had retired to Derby. The Derby Philosophical Society was largely devoted to a discussion of his ideas. Oxford intellectual Thomas Mozley (1806–93), who was at Oriel College in the 1820s, remembered th
e daring ‘Darwinians’ of Derby during his adolescence. These ‘Darwinians’, steeped in the works of Erasmus Darwin, maintained that ‘creatures were created by themselves’ – that species appeared on earth not because God had made them, but by evolution.9

  Erasmus Darwin’s evolutionary ideas had been expressed in Zoonomia (Greek for the Law of Life), a scientific treatise published in 1794. His ideas were also popularized in such long poems as the 4,384-line The Botanic Garden (1789) or The Temple of Nature (1803), which expounded a theory of impersonal evolution.

  But REPRODUCTION with ethereal fires

  New Life rekindles ere the first expires . . .

  Organic forms with chemic changes strive,

  Live but to die, and die but to revive!

  Immortal matter braves the transient storm,

  Mounts from the wreck, unchanging but in form.10

  The young Wordsworth and Coleridge objected to Darwin’s conservative poetic technique – it was in reaction against Darwin that they published the Lyrical Ballads in 1798. The middle-aged Wordsworth and Coleridge objected even more to the non-conservative complexion of Darwin’s ideas. Once they had become Anglican Tories, the implied atheism of Darwin’s poetry was anathema to them, though many of Zoonomia’s central ideas were borrowed by Wordsworth for his masterpiece on ‘Tintern Abbey’.11 It is hard for us to realize that in the 1790s very few people had heard of Wordsworth and Coleridge, whereas Erasmus Darwin – as well as being a medical, technological and scientific prodigy – had been the most famous poet in England.

  In The Botanic Garden, Darwin had apostrophized the moon which shone on their famous dining group, the Lunar Men:

  And pleased on WEDGWOOD ray your partial smile,

  A new Etruria decks Britannia’s isle.

  Charmed by your touch, the kneaded clay refines,

  The biscuit hardens, the enamel shines.12

  Both Josiah Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin had, from the first, been supporters of the French Revolution. Government spies kept a watch on Wedgwood, fearful that he, who sent his sons to Paris on a trading mission in 1791, might have been plotting the overthrow of monarchical government. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Wedgwood was not a profoundly political person. He merely belonged to that sunny, optimistic category of human being who thought that political change was likely to be for the better. Erasmus Darwin was more political than this, and fundamentally believed in Voltaire’s écrasez l’infâme! – the infamy being not only the old aristocratic order, but the orthodox Christianity which supported it. Dr Erasmus was quite happy for altars, as well as thrones, to topple. In 1798, the year of the Lyrical Ballads, the Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs in Pitt’s government, George Canning (who later became Prime Minister himself), actually thought it was worth blackening Dr Erasmus’s name by getting two hack writers to publish a parody of Darwin’s verse. In this feeble imitation-poem, which Canning hoped would be passed off as Darwin’s work, Pitt dies on the guillotine.

  Down falls the impatient axe with deafening din;

  The liberated head rolls off below,

  And simpering freedom hails the happy blow!13

  Erasmus was not arrested, but the perception remained that if you believed in revolutionary scientific ideas, you were also likely to be a political revolutionary. Erasmus had died in 1802, seven years before Charles Robert Darwin saw the light of day in Shrewsbury. Charles played down any influence which his grandfather’s ideas might have had upon him. One reason was, he wanted to be considered the originator of the idea of evolution. Another contributory factor, however, was the simple awkwardness of the Darwin name being associated in any way with the anarchy and bloodshed of revolution. There was an absolute need, as the new, aspirant upper-middle class emerged from the eighteenth-century chrysalis, to put a distance between the blood-spattered, cobbled streets of Paris and the sloping lawns and beautifully constructed hothouses of The Mount, Shrewsbury.

  Charles’s mother, Sukey (Susannah), was the eldest (and favourite) child of Josiah Wedgwood – potter, inventor, entrepreneur, millionaire phenomenon of Etruria in north Staffordshire. When George Stubbs painted the Wedgwood family in 1780, Sukey took centre-stage, mounted on a bay pony and looking indistinguishable from a member of the landed gentry. Her parents, who were cousins, sit to the side of the group portrait. Her mother, in an enormous hat which might have adorned the head of a Gainsborough countess, looks downwards, an indication of her depressive temperament, while Owd Wooden Leg, as the manufacturer was dubbed by his workforce, sits beside her, the prosthetic limb disguised as a stockinged and shoe-buckled calf casually crossed over a leg of flesh and blood; the source of the family wealth – the Etruria Works – discreetly blows a small puff of smoke into the bucolic air at a safe distance behind some trees. Sukey, like her mother and father, was a clever person of broad intellectual interests. Her sharp eyes, thick hair and thin lips were all inherited by Charles’s sister Caroline. Her appearance was a little ethereal, but also humorous, animated and affectionate. It has been plausibly assumed that affection for the old potter – who was ill for much of his last decade of life – was Sukey’s reason for delaying matrimony until she was thirty-one years old. This was distinctly late by eighteenth-century standards, though her parents, Sally and Jos, had been made to wait until Sally was nearly thirty before marrying. The Wedgwoods of that generation were cautious and financially shrewd. Old Richard Wedgwood, Sally’s father, had been a prosperous cheese-merchant in Cheshire, who forced her to hold back before marrying her potter-cousin – having no notion of the prodigious fortune which Jos Wedgwood’s genius would bring him. Another reason for the delay, and perhaps the likeliest, is that Sukey was in no hurry to marry Robert Darwin, who was vastly fat and had a filthy temper. A love match it was not.