Charles Darwin

by A. N. Wilson

  Was it mere accident that, when Blyth had been safely dispatched to Calcutta, Darwin began work in earnest on the origin of species? The little man from Tooting, abandoning his pharmacy to tell the men of science about the gradual evolution of birds’ wings and beaks, was in danger, in his artless, generous way, of making his insights part of the accepted currency of zoology. Darwin’s grandfather Josiah Wedgwood had been so obsessed by the dangers of industrial espionage that, for example, during the production of his famed jasper ware, he had separated the workers involved in the process into different worksheds, so none but he knew the production secret in its entirety. This was an understandable precaution since his considerable fortune depended upon others not being privy to his scientific and technological discoveries. Blyth, like many an innocent before and since, did not see scientific ideas of discoveries with quite such jealousy. He never berated Darwin for appropriating ‘his’ ideas because he probably did not think in such possessive terms. Darwin’s notebooks, however, made it clear that he now regarded the ideas which Blyth had so artlessly thrown out as being ‘my theory’. Like Alberich stealing the ring of power from the Rhinemaidens, Darwin wanted sole possession of the dangerous idea. Blyth had not had the time, the money nor, in fairness, the breadth of mind to give a comprehensive answer to his world-changing question – May not, then, a large proportion of what are considered species have descended from a common parentage? When the botanist J. D. Hooker was planning a visit to India later in the 1840s, Darwin suggested that he should look up Blyth in Calcutta. Patronisingly, he wrote, ‘he is a very clever, odd, wild fellow, who will never do, what he could do, from not sticking to any one subject’.71 Thus the heir to great riches dismissed the Tooting pharmacist. Not sticking to one subject – if that was a fault, Darwin was determined not to be guilty of it. Agassiz had (quite unintentionally, for he had never read Darwin on the boulders of Glen Roy when he presented his glacier theory in London) put a stop to Darwin’s advance as a geologist. The way forward was through the transmutation theory.

  If Blyth at the Zoological Society – founded in 1826 – was a minor figure, Richard Owen, who befriended Darwin during his phase of living in London, was a major one. In his Autobiography Darwin wrote, ‘I often saw Owen, whilst living in London, and admired him greatly, but was never able to understand his character and never became intimate with him. After the publication of the Origin of Species he became my bitter enemy, not owing to any quarrel between us, but as far as I could judge out of jealousy at its success.’72

  History is written by the victors, and for much of the twentieth century, after the revival of Darwin’s reputation, Owen was forcibly diminished by the Darwinians – in some quarters airbrushed altogether from the story. This imbalance of perspective was largely corrected by Nicolaas Rupke’s magnificent biography of 1994, which reminded us, not only of Owen’s actual views on evolution, but also of his many achievements in other spheres, as a museum director and as a scientist. In his long life he was idolized as ‘Britain’s answer to France’s Georges Cuvier and Germany’s Alexander von Humboldt’.73 Anyone who has visited the Natural History Museum in London is looking upon Owen’s achievement. It opened in 1885, when Owen was full of years, but he had presided over this collection when it was still housed at the British Museum, and he had campaigned tirelessly for a separate museum of natural history. Before that, he had set in order the great museum of anatomy, the Hunterian collection, at the Royal College of Surgeons. The cataloguing of Hunter’s huge collection of skeletons, foetuses and freaks in formaldehyde was a prodigious undertaking and could have been undertaken only by a great scientist who combined anatomical knowledge with enormous organizational skill. As well as being a key player in the glory age of the foundation of museums, he was an anatomist/palaeobiologist of historic and international standing.

  Tall, spindly, dandified, Owen was entering his prime when Darwin got to know him. (He would start the work of cataloguing the Hunterian collection in 1842.) Nothing that Darwin wrote at the time suggested hostility to Owen, and indeed friendship with the slightly older man put Darwin on a good footing not only with the London scientific establishment, but also with the largely Oxford-based circle of William Buckland’s Christ Church pupils. Hitherto, Darwin’s academic contacts had been predominantly Cambridge, but the Oxford dimension was useful to him.

  Owen had not himself been to Oxford. His father had been a West India merchant who died when Owen was only five years old. Owen briefly studied anatomy at Edinburgh University and subsequently at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. The rigours of hospital life had been his hard school. He went on to study anatomy under Cuvier in Paris, and returned to London as a lecturer and a foremost authority on fossils. When Darwin’s stupendous collection, formed during the Beagle voyage, began to arrive in London piecemeal before the return of the young naturalist himself, it had been Owen who was among the first to examine them. On Darwin’s return, Owen, whose formal knowledge of fossils far outsoared Darwin’s, helped him to classify the collection.

  Though not an Oxford man, Owen, through his museum work, met those who were. The trustees of the Hunterian Museum – Philip de Malpas Grey Egerton, a keen amateur palaeontologist, Viscount Cole and others – had been pupils of William Buckland, the redoubtable canon of Christ Church who was made Dean of Westminster by another pupil, Robert Peel, when he became Prime Minister. (He succeeded another clergyman-scientist, Samuel Wilberforce.) Owen introduced Darwin to Buckland, who enjoyed discussing the Galápagos land iguanas and marine iguanas.74 We mistake the nineteenth-century scientist-clergy if we suppose they were all bigots with closed minds. While at the beginning of his life as a scientist Buckland reconciled the biblical accounts of creation with his geological research, by taking the Deluge as historical – thereby allowing time for all the extinct species to leave behind fossil traces of themselves – he discarded these views when he had read Agassiz and became convinced by the glacier theory. He had also long ago recognized by reading Lyell that the earth was vastly older than the mythological creation narrative of Genesis, as interpreted by fundamentalists, would suggest. He later praised an early essay of Darwin’s (9 March 1838) on the role played by earthworms in soil-formation, while rejecting Darwin’s clearly false suggestion that chalkland had been formed in a similar way.75

  Poor Buckland, who died of tuberculosis in 1856, had for some time been insane. Owen heard, as early as 1850, that the Dean of Westminster had committed ‘much greater excesses than ever in respect to his own person – beating his head and scratching himself so as to produce alarm’. His younger children supposed that ‘Papa must be acting.’76

  Long before mental illness set in, Buckland had been gloriously eccentric. He always wore an academic gown when out on field trips collecting palaeontological specimens. His houses were filled with bones and fossils. One of his passions was zoophagy. He ‘used to say that he had eaten his way straight through the whole animal creation, and that the worst thing was a mole, that was utterly horrible’. He had eaten bluebottle flies, panthers, crocodiles and mice. At Nuneham, when presented with the heart of Louis XIV in a silver casket he exclaimed, ‘I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before’ – and down Buckland’s gullet it went.77

  The crucial thing about Owen, though, in the story of Darwin is to be found in Darwin’s First Notebook on the Transmutation of Species from 1837. ‘Mr Owen suggested to me that the production of monsters (which Hunter says owe their origin to very early stage) & which follow certain laws according to species, present an analogy to production of species.’78 What this makes clear is that as early as 1837 Owen believed in some form of evolution.

  Epigenesis is the process by which plants, animals and fungi develop from a seed, spore or egg through a series or sequence of steps in which cells differentiate and organs form. Saint-Hilaire accepted Lamarck’s notion that an evolutionary process was at work in nature, but he disputed his theory abo
ut its mechanism. Rather than Lamarck’s idea of acquired characteristics, Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844), Professor of Vertebrate Zoology at the Museé d’Histoire Naturelle – later one of the scientists who accompanied Napoleon to Egypt – believed that living organisms are adapted to their environment. Interference at some stage in the early development of the organism – the embryo or foetus – could lead to the advancement or holding back. A new species could thereby arise as a ‘monster’. Owen, whose early training had been as an anatomist, had, as stated, begun the catalogue of the Hunterian Museum in London (now housed in the Royal College of Surgeons) where dozens of monsters, hybrids and natural oddities are on display. It was here that his preoccupation with some of the central issues of evolutionary science began, and his engagement with the French forerunners in the field.

  It is extraordinary, given this fact, and given the numbers of scientists who had been wrestling with evolutionary ideas since his grandfather’s day, that Darwin apparently believed that he had made the subject his and his alone. With the rigour of an industrialist or retailer branding a particular product, he was determined that the concept of evolution should be stamped with his surname, though it was not a word he used until the final edition of The Origin, preferring the more accurate ‘modification’.

  In January 1842 his hero Humboldt came to London. Darwin met him at Sir Roderick Murchison’s house. Flatteringly, the request to meet Darwin came from Humboldt himself. It would be tempting to think that Darwin, who had now advanced to this belief that species mutate by means of natural selection – would have tried out his idea on the famous German. So costive was he, however, that he said nothing about it. ‘I was a little disappointed with the great man,’ he said later. ‘I can remember nothing distinctly about our interview, except that Humboldt was very cheerful and talked much.’79

  By now, Darwin was tiring of London life and pined for antisocial rural seclusion. Both he and Emma wanted a garden such as they had known in their own childhoods in Shrewsbury and at Maer. A second child, Annie, was born on 2 March 1841. Even if Darwin could endure the social round of breakfasts, dinners and ‘calls’ for much longer, Macaw Cottage, though a substantial residence by the standards of most Londoners, felt crowded now that it had to accommodate a full nursery staff.

  House-hunting began again. During Annie Darwin’s first months of life, her mother started to note properties and their acreages in her diary – forty acres at Langley, six near Reading, twenty-five in Harrow Weald. They were not looking to return to Shropshire or Staffordshire. What was needed was a substantial house, rurally secluded but within easy reach of the capital. Then they found the ideal place, in Woking, Surrey. Hesitation made them lose it to another tenant.

  Before they leave London with the children, we should mention one last acquaintance in the capital. When house-hunting in his bachelor days, Darwin had specifically wanted to find a place near Regent’s Park, and it is clear from the notebooks that he was a frequent visitor to the Zoological Society of London. Mr Hunt (first name lost) and Alexander Miller became friends. So did Jenny the orang-outang and her male companion Tommy. (Did Darwin smile at the thought of the orang-outang sharing a first name with Mrs Carlyle? There was no doubting which of the two females he preferred.)

  ‘Mr Yarrell [a London bookseller friend of Darwin’s, keen amateur naturalist] has seen Jenny, when Keeper was away, take her chair & bang against the door to force it open, when she could not succeed of herself. It was very curious to see her take bread from a visitor, & before eating every time look up to Keeper and see whether this was permitted & eat it [sic].’80 He noted her fondness for listening with ‘great attention’ to the harmonica, ‘& readily put it, when guided to her own mouth’. He also liked her fondness for the scent of verbena. She enjoyed the peppermints he gave her. ‘Will take & give food to Tommy.’ Jenny was the attentive, musical type of female whose company he enjoyed among his own family members. Indeed, as he watched her, and then returned to Upper Gower Street to see William and Annie, the thought was inescapable that Jenny was, in a sense, a family member.

  Then they found the house. The Kent village of Down (from the 1850s onwards it was spelt with an ‘e’, though the Darwins retained the old spelling for their house) was a hamlet, sixteen miles from London, ‘about 40 houses, with old walnut trees in middle where stands an old flint Church . . . Inhabitants very respectable – infant school – grown-up people great musicians – all touch their hats as in Wales, & sit at their open doors in evening. No high road leads through the village. There are butcher & baker & post office.’81

  Down House was in Darwin’s view ‘ugly, looks neither old nor new’. Nevertheless, ‘three stories, plenty of bedrooms’ and ‘in good repair’. They decided to take it, assuming that it would be possible to rent it for a year to see how they liked it. The owner, however, insisted upon a sale and Edward Cresy, a local architect and civil engineer who was acting on the Darwins’ behalf, urged Darwin to buy at the bargain price of £2,500. ‘I have therefore, after many groans, offered £2150 or at most 2200£.’82 All the other houses they had viewed were over £3,000. Darwin’s father advanced him £3,000 against his future inheritance, charging him 4 per cent interest.

  Emma, heavily pregnant, moved into the house on 14 September, and Darwin followed a few days later, having bought a horse and carriage for £100.

  On 23 September Emma went into labour, and gave birth to a sickly girl, Mary Eleanor. No sooner was her labour over than she heard that her father Josiah, who had suffered some kind of stroke and had been ill for a year, was close to death. Her sister Elizabeth wrote that he was ‘very weak’, though she continued to feed him.83

  Old Dr Darwin squeezed himself into a phaeton and drove over to minister to his old friend. When he saw the condition of Jos, he broke down and wept.84 In fact, Jos lingered for another year. It was the baby – Mary Eleanor – who died, aged three weeks. Emma supposed that the child had a look of Bessy, their mother. They buried her in Down churchyard. She said, ‘It will be long indeed before we either of us forget that poor little face.’85

  No wonder Erasmus, when he visited, called the place Down-in-the-Mouth. It was an inauspicious beginning. They remained devoted to one another, however, and the children. They had William, and they had Annie, who had already become the love of Charles Darwin’s life.

  9

  Half-Embedded in the Flesh of their Wives

  JESSY BRODIE, A tall Scotswoman with carroty hair, was forty-nine years old when she became the Darwins’ children’s nurse. Her pale face was smallpox-scarred. Her bright-blue eyes saw and had seen much. She had been the nurse to the children of William Makepeace Thackeray. She had seen one of Thackeray’s daughters, Jane, die of a chest infection. She had assisted at the birth of his daughter Minnie and she had witnessed the effects of postnatal depression on his wife – who tried to drown their three-year-old, Anny, in the sea at Margate. When Charlotte Brontë, who had never met Thackeray, artlessly dedicated to him her novel Jane Eyre it was assumed that ‘Currer Bell’, her nom de plume, had been a governess in the famous novelist’s house and that the mad wife in the attic, Mrs Rochester, was based on poor Mrs Thackeray, who, on a packet-steamer to Ireland, tried to throw herself overboard. Thackeray was overwhelmed by Brodie’s unselfishness while this drama ensued. ‘She was sick every quarter of an hour, but up again immediately staggering after the little ones, feeding one and fondling another. Indeed, a woman’s heart is the most beautiful thing that God has created and I can’t tell you what respect for her I have.’ In the following weeks, while the writer had to deal with his wife’s mental breakdown, there was ‘only poor Brodie of whom I can make a friend; and indeed her steadfastness and affection for the little ones deserves the best feelings I can give her. The poor thing has been very unwell, but never flinched for a minute, and without her, I don’t know what would have become of us all.’1 Brodie, during all this tragedy, had been planning to get married, but her intended dese
rted her and went to Australia. Thackeray could not afford her wages on top of his many other expenses, and a new position had to be found. She came to Down House in the year the Darwins moved in. The staff consisted of a butler (Parslow), a footman, two gardeners, a cook, a laundry maid, a housemaid and one or two nurserymaids. Bessy Harding, Willy’s nursemaid, was ‘pert’ to Brodie, who relied on Emma’s friendship and support to ease her into the household. She continued to miss the Thackeray children acutely. Thackeray knew that ‘she longs to come back to them’.

  Brodie was always known as Brodie because she was the nurse – or nanny as it would be termed in modern English parlance. The governess (when the children were old enough to have one) would be Miss So-and-So. The cook, regardless of marital status, would be Mrs. The maids were known by their first names. Thus was the hierarchy of things maintained. Darwin was a polite, kindly employer, always prefacing his requests to them with the words, ‘Would you be so good . . .’ Nevertheless, the practically minded Brodie, whose father from the north-east Scottish coast had been a ship’s master – a prisoner of war during Napoleonic times – found the quietness of Down stultifying. She considered it a pity that Mr Darwin, unlike Mr Thackeray, had not something to do.2 One of the gardeners, Henry Lettington, a deacon of the local chapel, made a comparable observation. ‘Oh, my poor master has been very sadly. I often wish he had something to do. He moons about in the garden, and I have seen him stand doing nothing before a flower for ten minutes at a time. If only he had something to do I really believe he would be better.’3