Charles Darwin

by A. N. Wilson

  The work levels, in other words, were minimal. A student of the twenty-first century could easily master, within a few months, everything which had been studied in an entire university course in 1828.

  ‘The three years which I spent at Cambridge were the most joyful in my happy life,’ wrote Darwin in his Autobiography, and it is not difficult to see why. Although notionally engaged in the study of mathematics and a few books of Homer, Darwin was in fact continuing to study science, at the feet of the Cambridge scientists. He enjoyed college life, and the company of other young men. And he formed at least one friendship – with a cousin, inevitably – which would last through life.

  The friend was Darwin’s second cousin William Darwin Fox (1805–80). Being four years Darwin’s senior, Fox took him in hand and became his ‘entomological tutor’.4 Fox had a high forehead, lustrous dark-brown hair, very blue eyes, a sharp nose and a humorous mouth. He was mad about insects. They called one another ‘Fox’ and ‘Darwin’, just as Robert Waring called Uncle Jos ‘Wedgwood’, and Uncle Jos called Robert ‘Darwin’ – even though all were kinsmen. We get a taste of the quality of their friendship when we read a letter Darwin wrote to Fox at the end of the first year, shortly after they had gone their separate ways to spend the Long Vacation with their families. ‘My dear Fox, I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects.’5 There followed what was in effect a journal of the beetles and creepy-crawlies he had encountered since returning to Shrewsbury, with illustrations.

  Fox would continue, throughout his seventy-five years of life, to be an avid amateur naturalist. Like Darwin at Cambridge, he was preparing to take orders. For thirty-five years, he would be the Rector of Delamere in Cheshire, where he would follow the pattern of life enjoyed by dozens of Victorian parsons, tending a rural parish and learning more each year about the natural history around him. Darwin’s own father, though a doctor, not a clergyman, modelled himself on Gilbert White,6 the parson at Selbourne in Dorset, whose account of the birds, flora, insects and animals of his country parish was recorded in round-the-year diaries.

  ‘I had scruples about declaring my belief in all the dogmas of the Church of England,’ Darwin would write, ‘though otherwise I liked the thought of being a country clergyman.’7 Many readers of the Autobiography take this at face value, and imagine that Darwin’s life of seclusion at Down House, after he married, was a repetition of the life of a naturalist parson such as Gilbert White, only without the religion. Such a reading overlooks two, possibly related, facets of the story. One is Darwin’s immense wealth. Dons love money. They can smell it. And the arrival in the then tiny community of Cambridge of another Darwin boy had not gone unnoticed. Professors at Cambridge are not required to teach, or even to notice, the undergraduates. That is the job of the college Fellows who act as supervisors. There is something very conspicuous about Adam Sedgwick, for example, taking great note of Darwin, and we may question whether the Woodwardian Professor of Geology would have befriended an undergraduate of humbler means. The gentle and apparently unworldly Professor of Botany, John Stevens Henslow, was another who became Darwin’s friend even while he was just an undergraduate. (It was a friendship with momentous consequences.)

  Henslow was Darwin’s senior by thirteen years. He at first held the chair of mineralogy and then, after 1825, that of botany, which was his real passion. His predecessor, the Revd Thomas Martyn, had created the first Botanic Garden in Cambridge, on a site now occupied by the Cavendish and other laboratories, but it had fallen into decay in Martyn’s latter years, and there had not been any botanical lecturers in the University for a long time when Henslow took over. It was in 1831, in Darwin’s last year, that the University, under Henslow’s direction, acquired the forty acres off the Trumpington Road and, after an exchange of lands between the University and Trinity Hall, effected by Act of Parliament, created the new Botanic Gardens modelled on the gardens at Kew. (It was not until 1851 that the Natural Science Tripos was established at Cambridge.)

  As well as being an inspiring botanist, and geologist, Henslow had another characteristic which was a crucial factor in his friendship with Charles Darwin. It had always been part of Henslow’s fantasy-life that he should become one of the great explorer-botanists, like Bougainville or Joseph Banks. Fired by reading Levaillant’s Travels he had imagined himself discovering the plant life of Africa.8 His grandfather was Sir John Henslow, Chief Surveyor of the Royal Navy during Nelson’s time, and Henslow, who grew up on the Medway in Kent, was accustomed to the sight of tall ships and those who exercise their business in great waters. His father, however, a solicitor in Rochester,9 who found himself the parent of eleven children, had no money to finance such an adventure. You had to be rich to be an explorer. So Henslow was sent to St John’s College, Cambridge, where his cleverness brought the success described.

  Darwin was a rich young man through whom the innocent Henslow could live vicariously. Darwin became known in Cambridge as ‘the man who walks with Henslow’, and he often dined with Henslow’s family in the evenings. These were the days before mere Fellows of colleges were permitted to marry. Professors could marry and have family life. So once again, here is Darwin enjoying an unusual privilege. Most undergraduates had no taste of family life during their three Cambridge years, but by ‘walking with Henslow’ Darwin could enjoy a hearth, children’s voices, firelight flickering on silver – all things denied the average undergraduate with his pewter mug of ale and his college dinner served at a long refectory table. Everyone who knew Henslow remarked upon his benevolence. After Darwin had come to know him well, he acquired the living of Hitcham in Hertfordshire, and took his duties seriously as a parish priest, with ‘excellent schemes for his poor parishioners’. He was unaffected in his Christian faith, and ‘so orthodox’, recorded Darwin, ‘that he told me one day he should be grieved if a single word of the Thirty-nine Articles were altered’.10

  Darwin’s wealth would not have impeded, but nor did it facilitate, comparable simplicities. When he was dying he became aware that he had never lived for others, and his granddaughter Gwen Raverat noted that the poor did not really exist for him.

  The Darwin and Wedgwood money, however, meant that there was no danger of his being neglected as an undergraduate, and he was taken up, not only by the professors but by his fellow students. This is the only time in Darwin’s life when we see him being touched by the arts. His Shrewsbury schoolfriend Charles Whitley, who had followed him to Cambridge and was at St John’s, took him to the Fitzwilliam, the University museum, and showed him pictures. The taste lasted for a few years, so that he was able to experience, for a while, a fondness for pictures in the National Gallery in London. (Whitley was later a canon of Durham, and reader in natural philosophy – that is, science – at Durham University.) His friend John Maurice Herbert, later a county court judge in Cardiff, nurtured Darwin’s musical tastes. Darwin listened to Herbert and his friends play chamber music, and Herbert steered him in the direction of King’s College Chapel, so that weekday walks in pursuit of beetles would now conclude, for Darwin, with taking in the anthems sung by the choir there. He loved the sound so much – ‘intense pleasure, so that my backbone would sometimes shiver’ – that he actually used to hire the King’s choristers to sing in his rooms at Christ’s. These were the happy days that he recalled from an arid old age, by which time he had lost all taste for art and music and declared, ‘I am so utterly destitute of an ear, that I cannot perceive a discord, or keep time and hum a tune correctly; and it is mystery how I could possibly have derived pleasure from music.’11 The plaintive words suggest bafflement at himself, unable in old age to see how he could have lost such capacities for inward joy.

  For there was something else in Darwin, apart from his great wealth, which made it unlikely that he would ever happily settle down, as Fox did, and become one of hundreds of naturalist-clergymen, riding round their parish in early days on horseback and in later times on pennyfarthing bicycles, bu
tterfly net over their shoulder, shovel hat on head. That is, Darwin always wanted to cut a dash; his eye for the main chance was unfaltering. The diffident manners concealed this, sometimes even from himself, but it was there from an early stage. It had certainly begun to stir in Edinburgh, which perhaps made Grant uneasy when Darwin, with a little too much vigour and a little bit too much pleasure, decided to challenge Grant at the meeting of the Plinian Society. The same ardent ambition surfaced as Henslow spoke of his own youthful desire to become a great explorer, a naturalist on the world stage. Had Dr Robert Darwin seen the latent, highly aggressive ambition which lay buried beneath the surface of the shy, moody, shooting-obsessed younger son, he might have been less worried. All he could see, however, after a lifetime of hard work himself, building up a distinguished medical practice and managing what was in effect a highly successful small private bank, was a pair of loafers: Ras, while finishing his medical studies in Vienna, was becoming increasingly dependent upon opium and unable to settle to anything, Charles an idler.

  The Long Vacation of 1828 was long indeed, and you sense its seeming endlessness in Darwin’s letters to Fox, which were largely about beetle-collecting. ‘My head is quite full of Entomology. I long to empty some information out of it into Yours’;12 ‘My dear old Fox I long to see you again, but I suppose it will not be long before Term begins.’13 Those words were written in July, and he did not return to Cambridge until the very end of October. Dr Robert was neither in the best of health (gout) nor in the best of tempers. Darwin was dispatched for two months to Barmouth where he endeavoured to revise mathematics, but concentrated rather upon the local insects. Barmouth is a delightful little resort on the mouth of the River Mawddach in north-west Wales, an easy journey from Shropshire. After two months there, lodging with a private tutor, with whom he did not get along, and in whose company his mathematics did not improve, he longed for congenial companionship, and for shooting. He went to stay with Fox at his family home, Osmaston Hall near Derby, and, as Darwin most revealingly remarked to Fox, ‘Formerly I used to have two places, Maer & Woodhouse, about which, like a wheel on a pivot, I used to revolve. Now I am luckier in having a third, & I hope I need not say that third is Osmaston.’14 The Mount was no longer pivotal. Perhaps it had stopped being pivotal when Sukey died. In September at Maer, he managed to kill ‘75 head of game; a very contemptible number, but there are very few birds. I killed however a brace of Black Game [black grouse] . . .’15 By the beginning of October, his sister Caroline drew up the following ‘petition’ directed at the Darwin family from The Mount:

  To the

  Charitable & Humane The Case of a Distressed Sportsman – 1828. Oct 3 –

  Charles Darwin gent – humbly petitions all benevolently disposed persons to pay attention to his case –

  Whereas he the aforesaid formerly gained a respectable livelihood by destroying hares, pheasants, partridges & woodcocks, with the aid of a double barrelled gun, & the said gun becoming dangerous & liable to destroy the aforesaid Charles Darwin’s legs, arms, body & brains & consequently unfit for use – he is reduced to lay his deplorable case before the charitable & humane being utterly unable to raise the sum requisite for the purchase of new Double barrd Gun – Value £20 –

  £.

  s.

  d.

  R. W. Darwin

  5

  0

  0

  Miss Darwin

  5

  0

  0

  Miss Susan Darwin

  5

  0

  0

  Miss Cath Darwin

  5

  0

  016

  The gun was duly purchased. (Six years later, in Dorset, George Loveless and five other farm labourers were transported to Australia for daring to protest that they were unable to feed their families on the wages of six shillings per week, that is, £15 twelve shillings per annum. They were named the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and the trade union movement was born.) Darwin clearly felt that his father kept him on a tight leash financially.

  Just before the end of this first Long Vac, Darwin, at a dinner at Netley Hall, five miles south of Shrewsbury, met Frederick William Hope, a clergyman-entomologist who would found the chair of zoology at Oxford in 1849. Hope was friends with Darwin’s Edinburgh mentors Jameson, Grant and others, and he possessed one of the largest collections of insects in Britain, which he gave to his old University when he founded the Oxford chair. He promised Darwin 300 or 400 insect specimens before Christmas. It was in many ways the high point of his vacation.17

  The next term was dominated by his friendship with Fox and his passion for insects. ‘I live almost entirely with Fox and Entomology goes on most surprisingly.’ So much did the scientific interest predominate over the theological that Fox began to fear that he would be ‘plucked’18 – refused a degree – which might have spoilt his chances of being ordained and getting a curacy.

  He went home to The Mount in late December, giving his father a death’s-head hawkmoth for his Christmas present. ‘You cannot imagine how pleased my Father was with the Death’s-Head’s; to use his own words “if he himself had thought for a week he could not picked out [sic] a present so acceptable”.’19 Sometimes one suspects that Dr Robert’s ironies were lost on his children. In January 1829, stricken with fever and in an agony of gout, the Doctor took to his bed while Darwin returned to Cambridge.

  In those days, the first examination sat by a Cambridge undergraduate was in the Lent Term of his second year. Called ‘Little-Go’, it consisted of a fairly rudimentary set of mathematical problems, and a few classical set texts. ‘For a serious reading man, the “Little-Go”, was an irritant rather than a worry.’20 For Darwin, it was a worry. It was one thing to irritate his father, from whom he was increasingly estranged. Quite another was to disappoint Henslow, his new father-substitute. Darwin had started his university career a term late – January 1828 – whereas most undergraduates began the academic year in October. His tutor at Christ’s advised him to put off Little-Go for a year, rather than taking it in the spring of 1829 after only four terms. The mathematics, in particular, was a worry to him, and it was with exultation that he was able, in March 1830, to write to Fox, ‘I am through my little Go! I am too much exalted to humble myself by apologising for not having written before . . . I went in yesterday, & have just heard the joyful news.’21

  He celebrated by going up to London, where Erasmus had already set up house in Great Marlborough Street, increasingly drug-dependent, but quietly social and eccentric. He also saw Hope, with whom he planned a summer expedition of insect-collecting. Much of that summer was spent with Hope – and with Thomas Campbell Eyton, a Shropshire coeval and fellow entomologist who was also at Cambridge with him. Visits to Wales deepened Darwin’s insect-knowledge, while keeping him safely out of the influence of home. It is striking just how little time Darwin spent in his father’s company when an undergraduate; and for the rest of his life he kept his distance from the increasingly sick and lonely parent. Christmas 1830, for example, was spent, not at The Mount, but in his college rooms at Christ’s, preparing for the final heave of exams.

  Although it fitted the image he was later to promote of himself as an ‘idler’, who acquired his scientific knowledge all by himself and by observation when on board the Beagle, Darwin was always a voracious reader and a careful student, even if he was not always reading the books set by the Cambridge examination syllabus.

  Conversations with Henslow, the world-traveller manqué, had whetted Darwin’s appetite for reading the great explorers. Above all, he read Alexander von Humboldt. After Humboldt’s lifetime (1769–1859), world literature was so vast, scientific knowledge so advanced and multifarious, technological progress so prodigious, that there could be no universal genius who knew all that there was to be known. But in his own time Humboldt almost was that man. There had been many helps along the way. One was the death of his father, a Prussian army major, when Humboldt was
just ten. His formidable mother asked no less a personage than Goethe to advise on the education of her two sons. Goethe, himself the ‘universal genius’ of his own generation and, in the eyes of nearly all Germans, for all time, suggested that the older boy, Karl Wilhelm, should be reared as a philologist and man of letters, while the younger, Alexander, should be a scientist. Both Humboldts were very fortunate in their friends. Their mother engaged the greatest scholars in their various fields to teach them, but they also simply happened to meet the right people at the right time. (Darwin had this gift.) Alexander von Humboldt also had the great advantage of being gay, but without, so far as one can tell, any neurosis about it, or the tendency to make himself unhappy in the manner of Michelangelo’s or Shakespeare’s sonnets about unrequited love for boys. So he was detached, and in no need of the consolations and distractions of home. He was therefore an ideal scientific explorer. It was George Forster, himself a heterosexual, the boy who had travelled as a naturalist-illustrator on Captain Cook’s second voyage – aboard the Resolution – who had introduced Humboldt to travel. Forster took young Alexander on his first serious journey, a mineralogical excursion up the Rhine, which enabled Humboldt to write his first scientific book, when he was twenty-one, on basaltic rock formations. Forster’s magnetic personality and legendary conversations persuaded Humboldt that he should become a traveller, and he set about preparing himself for the task by learning languages (something Darwin never did) and by attaching himself to a proposed voyage of circumnavigation with a French sea-captain called Baudin. This expedition was frustrated by the wars (1796). There was an unsuccessful attempt to reach Egypt in time to coincide with Napoleon’s occupation. By the time he was thirty, however, Humboldt, by now the master of many languages and as well informed about science as any European of his age, was in a strong position to set off, with Aimé Bonpland (who had been going with Baudin as botanist to the failed voyage round the world). The two friends sailed from Corunna in June 1799, crossed the Atlantic, stopping in Tenerife to see the remarkable meteor-shower of 12–13 November, reached Caracas by the end of the year, spent four months following the course of the Orinoco, and then made extensive journeys, both in the Caribbean (memorably to Cuba) and in South America, exploring the Amazon and Peru. Humboldt formed an encyclopaedic collection of minerals and archaeological relics. All the time he was travelling, he was engaged in scientific investigations, for example into the geographical distribution of plants, the origins of tropical storms, the relationship between the decrease in mean temperature and the increase of elevation beyond sea-level. It was he who discovered the decrease of intensity of the earth’s magnetic force from the poles to the Equator. In 1808, when he had returned to Europe, he wrote up the travels in a monumental Personal Narrative, and it has been rightly observed, that ‘with the exception of Napoleon Bonaparte, he was the most famous man in Europe’.22