by A. N. Wilson
Lyell was the most widely respected scientist in the eyes of the public, as was attested by Darwin’s discovery of intelligent English merchants in South America discussing The Principles of Geology. Lyell’s own views, however, were adapting all the time and he had by no means wholly convinced the scientific establishment. William Whewell, reviewing the second volume of Principles, had coined the terms ‘uniformitarian’ and ‘catastrophist’ to describe the opposing sects among geologists. Lyell, as the chief uniformitarian, was concerned to demonstrate that gradual changes in the environment, and the inherent relation between organisms and their environment, were enough to explain geological change, without recourse to imagined ‘catastrophes’ interrupting a natural process. (Buckland, Professor of Geology at Oxford, for example, remained a convinced catastrophist.)
That the young Darwin, who had collected so many specimens and made so many innovative observations on his recent voyage, should be a keen supporter of Lyell’s was of tremendous encouragement to the older man. (Lyell was twelve years Darwin’s senior.)
Though Lyell’s work was primarily concerned with geology perse, it clearly had a direct bearing upon other branches of science. The fossil evidence provided tantalizing proof of the repeated extinction of species: tantalizing since Lyell rejected Lamarckian notions of ‘transmutation’, and rejected catastrophist theories which could explain, for example, why prehistoric creatures ceased to be – not enough room for a Megatherium in Noah’s Ark. Lyell could see that the origin of species must be attributable to just some such ‘natural’ process as explained the geological formation of the planet, but how species evolved eluded him.
I have admitted that we have only data for extinction, and I have left it rather to be inferred instead of enunciating it even as my opinion, that the place of lost species is filled up (as it was of old) from time to time by new species. I certainly wish it to be inferred that . . . the extinction has been going on in the last 6,000 years, and that the substitution of species to supply the vacancies, which must always be occurring, has also been going on; though how, is a point we are as ignorant of as of the manner of God’s creating the first man.18
In this letter to Professor Sedgwick, Lyell in effect wrote the blueprint for what would be central to Darwin’s scientific journey for the next twenty years. Darwin set out to answer Lyell’s questions. He was to do so using the arguments which had been spelt out by Edward Blyth, but he needed twenty years, and more than twenty, to provide what he considered convincing support for the theory.
The latest news, Lyell wrote to his sister in May 1837,
is that two fossil monkeys have at last been found, one in India contemporary with extinct quadrupeds, but not very ancient – Pliocene perhaps – another in the south of France, Miocene and contemporary with Palaeotherium. So that, according to Lamarck’s view, there may have been a great many thousand centuries for their tails to wear off, and the transformation to men to take place.19
While Charles Lyell lampooned Lamarckian evolutionism, he and Darwin were deep in geology. ‘I am very full of Darwin’s new theory of Coral Islands . . . the last efforts of drowning continents to lift their heads above water.’20
History labels Lyell as the pioneer of modern geology, Darwin as that of evolutionary biology. It is fascinating to see, during those very active years after Darwin’s return to England and before his marriage, how much Lyell looked to Darwin for geological research, and how at this stage it appeared to be Lyell who was most concerned with the riddle of human origins. So, for example, in 1838 we find Lyell writing to Sedgwick on the knotty issue of whether nature ‘has at length, stopped short in her operations’ – that is, whether development or mutation has ceased since the creation of man. Lyell put it to Sedgwick that there were insuperable difficulties in this point of view. The Cambridge scientists Whewell and Sedgwick appeared to be saying that ‘God rested on the seventh day. Thereafter nature ceased to develop or adapt.’ ‘To me’, wrote Lyell, ‘it appears that the line you are represented to have taken is to hazard a far bolder hypothesis than I should have dared to do, viz. that no new creatures have begun to exist for the last 6,000 years, or for such time as man has existed, although geology has now brought to light the proofs of an indefinite series of antecedent changes, such repeated failures of species of animals and plants, and their replacement by others.’ He went on, ‘The burden of proof rests on him who ventures to affirm that Nature has, at length, stopped short in her operations, and that while the causes of destruction are in full activity, even where man cannot interfere, she has suspended her powers of repair and renovation.’21
To Darwin, by contrast, Lyell turned, not for his views on such generalized or quasi-metaphysical notions, but for his thoughts on coral reefs and volcanoes. In his revision of Principles of Geology, Lyell was asking how far Darwin considered ‘gradual risings and sinkings of the spaces occupied by corraline and volcanic islands in the Pacific as leaning in favour of the doctrine that many parallel lines of upheaval or depression are formed contemporaneously’.22
As we follow Darwin’s footsteps during these very active years, then, nothing prepares us, quite, for the direction they were to take. Darwin, after a brief spell with the family in Shrewsbury and at Maer, took rooms at 36 Great Marlborough Street, just down the road from the house of his brother Erasmus who was, in the judgement of Thomas Carlyle, ‘idle’. Darwin was the opposite. He had gone abroad ‘idle’, but he returned as a frenzied, driven person, a marked contrast from Erasmus who, beyond his friendship with bluestocking Harriet Martineau and the Carlyles, actually ‘did’ very little. Darwin allowed himself to be escorted about London by Ras, but only to a very limited degree was he a social animal at this stage. He liked Carlyle at first meeting, but told his cousin Emma Wedgwood, ‘It is high treason, but I cannot think that Jenny [Mrs Carlyle] is either quite natural or lady-like.’23 On another occasion he confessed himself unable to understand ‘half the words she speaks, from her Scotch pronunciation’.24 Where Erasmus, for all his eremitical tendencies and his self-protective fusspot bachelordom, had all the time in the world for these bluestocking friends, Darwin was seized with an insatiable appetite for work. For the first three months of 1837 he was in Cambridge – ‘Read paper on “sand-tubes” at Cambridge Philosophical Society’25 – writing up his researches on the voyage, and preparing volumes on the zoology and geology of those researches. At the same time he was making the Cambridge academics – Henslow, Sedgwick, Whewell – aware that he was now a professional scientist. Whewell responded by making Darwin one of the two Secretaries of the Geological Society. In London, while continuing to write up his researches and catalogue his prodigious collections, he was also very visibly setting up his brass plate as the brightest young scientist in Britain. At the Geological Society he heard Lyell’s laudatory allusions to his work. He himself read notes on Rhea americana and Rhea darwinii at the Zoological Society of London.26 He applied, successfully, to the Chancellor of the Exchequer to finance the publication, with engravings, of his Beagle researches. ‘The whole of the Collection made by Mr Darwin either has already been, or will hereafter be distributed to the Public Museums, where they will be of acknowledged Service; and under the circumstances of the case, the Chancellor of the Exchequer feels justified in recommending to the Board [of the Treasury] to give their sanction to the Application of a Sum not exceeding in the whole £1000 from Civil Contingencies in aid of this Publication.’27 At one bound, Darwin had liberated his scientific endeavours from dependency on his father’s patronage, and established himself as a figure of national consequence.
More momentous, however, than any of the published work, or any of the papers and lectures which Darwin gave in this period, were the notebooks relating to the transmutation of species, the first of which he remembered as beginning ‘about July 1837’. (This is the notebook on which he had written, in 1856, ‘all useful pages cut out’.)28 In the first surviving page, he went back to his grandfathe
r’s Zoonomia, and by the fifth surviving page he was searching for the ‘final cause of life’.29 It is clear that his thoughts had been moving along the lines outlined in Blyth’s essays on evolution. In the notebooks we watch Darwin wanting to test the veracity of the theory with complete thoroughness. Some of the observations are charming – ‘Gnu reaches Orange River & says so far will I go and no further.’30 Others – ‘Strong odour of negroes, a point of real repugnance’31 – are less so. The notebooks of this period32 demonstrate the fullest possible engagement with the evolutionary questions which would make Darwin’s name. They are notebooks, not essays. They are fragmentary. They reveal a naturalist with a prodigiously wide knowledge – of botany, zoology and geology – and a wide reading in his subject, trying to put together the idea of ‘mutation’. How could such a strange idea work in practice, however slow the ‘mutation’ was? ‘We need not think that fish & penguins really pass into each other.’ But did not Blyth’s idea actually require just such a happening? If a ‘large proportion of what are considered species have descended from a common parentage’, would we not be obliged to believe that mammoths, woodpeckers, chimpanzees and water voles all descended, somehow or other, from a common ancestor? The notebooks find no answer to such a strange puzzle, but they are aware of its strangeness. Notebook B notes the differences in the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris between Georges Cuvier, who insisted that there were great gaps in the supposed chain linking molluscs and vertebrates, and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who believed in the fundamental ‘unity’ of species.33 Most of the notebooks are made up of short pithy observations. ‘Fish never become a man – does not require fresh creation! – If continent had sprung up round Galapagos in Pacific side, the Oolite order of things might have easily formed.’ By now, whenever he refers to evolutionary theories of the origin of species he speaks of ‘my theory’.34 ‘With belief of change transmutation & geographical grouping we are led to endeavour to discover causes of change.’35 These words were probably written in 1838.36 This was the year in which Darwin believed he had indeed lighted upon the cause of evolution: or at any rate, the dominating factor in the natural world. He found it not in his many observations of natural history, nor in the work of his fellow scientists, but in that contentious work of economics – the Revd Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population first published in 1798 but subsequently revised. Malthus, a wealthy Surrey clergyman, died in 1834 of heart disease, aged sixty-three. He had very much belonged to the same intellectual and social milieu as Darwin himself. Ras Darwin’s friend Harriet Martineau, one of the economist’s most fervent disciples, wrote to Darwin’s friend W. J. Fox (William Johnson Fox, preacher and author; a different figure from Darwin’s cousin William Darwin Fox, Rector of Delamere.), ‘I cd scarcely help laughd [sic] that day to think what the Age wd have said if it cd have seen us sitting after dinner; I, dancing Mrs Wedgwood’s baby & Malthus patting its cheeks.’ (This was Fanny Wedgwood, married to Hensleigh. Malthus’s daughter had been a bridesmaid at their wedding.37 Ras was at the dinner.)38
Darwin read Malthus fifteen months after his return to England, at the very moment when he was cramming the notebooks with miscellaneous observations about the species question. Malthus provided him with the key. The implications of Malthus’s book, he would later recall, ‘struck me at once’. That is, it was not just the strongest or the most robust who would get ahead in the ‘struggle for existence’. Rather, it was those who possessed some particular attribute, or variation, which made them suited to living in a particular environment. Those possessing such attributes got ahead. Those lacking them went to the wall. Little by little by little, over many generations, these attributes would be refined, until ‘The result would be the formation of a new species . . . Here at last I had a theory by which to work.’39
Absolutely central, then, to Darwin’s story is this epiphany, this revelation, that Malthus explained the secrets of biology’s puzzles. The puzzles would continue to be scientific ones. The answer, however, was found in a socio-economic theory. Another word for ‘a theory by which to work’ would be a myth. Darwin had found the central consolation myth which he would give to his Victorian contemporaries. What Malthus had believed applied only to the specific question of human population growth and hunger actually applied to everything.
Malthus is one of those distinguished intellectuals of whom Darwin would be one – Marx, Freud and John Maynard Keynes come to mind as others – whose surnames, morphed into epithets, became symbols for ways of looking at the world. For those who hated the ‘Malthusian’ economic idea – such as Charles Dickens, who lampooned it in the figure of Scrooge inveighing against the ‘surplus population’ – it would always encapsulate meanness and cruelty. William Cobbett denounced the ‘barbarous and impious Malthus’.40 For Malthusians, such as Harriet Martineau, his Essay simply explained the nature of the world. His Essay on Population, in short, was one of those books in which the nineteenth century delighted, which could be said to explain not merely a specific question – how can populations increase without an increase in the food supply? – but every question. Malthus wrote his Essay after extended conversations with his father, who had espoused just such a Utopian view of politics as had attracted old Josiah Wedgwood and Dr Erasmus Darwin. Malthus’s father, a disciple of the Marquis de Condorcet and William Godwin, had believed that human wretchedness was caused by bad governance. Malthus himself, although he later joined the Church of England in order to get to Jesus College, Cambridge, had been sent by his father to the Dissenting academy at Warrington.41 Malthus, talking to his father in the aftermath of the French Revolution, had seen that, however enlightened your system of government, the simple mathematics of population and food supply remained the fundamental fact of human existence. Populations increased on a ‘geometric ratio’ (2–4–8–16), doubling every twenty-five years. The food supply can increase, at its utmost, only in an ‘arithmetic’ ratio (1–2–3–4). Hence, every few years, the population finds that it does not have enough to eat. Here, Malthusian ‘checks’ take place to cull the ‘surplus’ population. These are famines, plagues or wars.
The paradox of Malthus’s Essay, coming when and above all where it did – in Britain – is that while it had been partially true for most of European history, it was about to become untrue. While he wrote the first version of the Essay, Britain was suffering food shortages during the Napoleonic Wars. Shortages would continue after the wars. When the Industrial Revolution really began to take off in Britain, however, for the first time in economic history, the phenomenon became manifest of an increase of population actually increasing wealth. Victorian Britain would see a largely urban population growth, which created sufficient surplus wealth to feed the swelling populace, if necessary by importing food. By the time Malthus died, Britain was ceasing – or at any rate urban England was ceasing – to be Malthusian, though Scotland and, most disastrously, Ireland remained Malthusian economies, as do, to this day, the countries of sub-Saharan Africa.42
Darwin started to read Malthus’s Essay on 28 September 1838. He can scarcely have been ignorant of the central Malthusian argument, which had been incorporated by Paley. William Whewell had discussed the Malthusian ideas in a paper delivered to the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1829. In 1838, moreover, largely thanks to the tariffs imposed on imported wheat which artificially inflated the price of bread – keeping the great landowners rich and the poor hungry – there had been food riots in Britain. Darwin was living in a country where it appeared that Malthus’s doctrines were demonstrable social facts. A clergyman Malthus may have been, but Darwin in his notebooks seized upon the essential godlessness of the idea. He writes, ‘Epidemics – seem intimately related to famines [sic], yet very inexplicable,’ and then quotes Malthus, adding his own underlinings and exclamation marks: ‘It accords with the most liberal! spirit of philosophy to believe that no stone can fall, or plant rise, without the immediate agency of the deity. But we know f
rom experience! that these operations of what we call nature, have been conducted almost! invariably according to fixed laws. And since the world began, the causes of population & depopulation have been probably as constant as any of the laws of nature with which we are acquainted.’43 Darwin (who slightly misquotes Malthus, who wrote ‘divine power’ rather than ‘deity’) then commented, ‘I would apply it not only to population & depopulation, but extermination & production of new forms – their number & correlations.’44 Lyell’s geological revelations had shown, in fossil evidence, the plenitude of extinct species. The argument against transmutation had been that these species had simply died out to be replaced by new ones. The system by which they were replaced could only be by a new creation. By embracing Malthusianism as a general principle of nature, Darwin could see, not only how less adequate species became extinct, but how a process could be at work within species which enabled them to adapt and survive. Thus, while some species had become extinct, others – whose fossils showed such affinity and comparability with later species – were in the process of transmuting themselves, adapting to Malthusian circumstances in order to make themselves capable of survival. Nature, the whole history of the natural process, was nothing less than a struggle for survival. The hind legs of a hare grow longer and longer to escape being eaten, and the giraffe’s neck becomes longer to reach foliage. Those who don’t eat die, or go hungry, just as weaker, feebler classes of people, unable adequately to feed their families, ground down by the draconian Poor Laws so pleasing to Miss Martineau, were confined to the workhouse, whereas the Darwins and the Martineaus and the Wedgwoods had large comfortable houses and incomes. As the Quarterly Review put it when considering the Malthusian question, ‘It would be a real blessing if the working classes could be made acquainted with some of the fundamental principles of Political Economy: such as the laws of population; the causes of the inequality of mankind . . . They would then perceive that inequality does not originate in the encroachments of the rich or the enactments of the powerful, but has been necessarily coeval with society itself in all its stages.’45
