by A. N. Wilson
In a confessional letter to J. D. Hooker, Darwin in January 1844 described himself as ‘engaged’ in a very presumptuous work.
At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a ‘tendency to progression’ ‘adaptations from the slow willing of animals’ &c, but the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his – though the means of change are wholly so. I think I have found out (here’s presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.4
In Darwin’s long, silent cogitations at Down, we watch him turn into a contemplative. On the one hand, he became an intensely introverted and concentrated version of what he had been since boyhood – the detailed observer of natural phenomena in all their minute detail, in all their prodigious variety. On the other hand he was a man who had seen an all-containing vision of things. It was like confessing a murder because the theory could see off, not just the Revd William Paley, but also the ‘Watchmaker’ whose intricate design Paley had described with such eloquent reverence. The German scholars of the New Testament in Tübingen had shaken the nineteenth century’s belief in the divinity of Christ. Lyell’s Geology had made it impossible to maintain a literal belief in the Book of Genesis as the work of science, or history, which the seventeenth century had tried to make it. ‘The simple way by which species became exquisitely adapted to various ends’ thus ‘murdered’ not just traditional faith but the Creator himself. Or at least the ‘murder’ removed the logical necessity of belief in such a figure. What appeared to be intricate design was a system which made the exquisite adaptations by itself. Others – including Goethe, Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, Blyth – might have mused upon the possibility of evolution, upon the mutability of species, upon the emergence of new species by processes of adaptation. Ever since 1789, the British Establishment, which included the universities and the Church of England by Law Established, had associated new ideas with progressivism, science with revolution, speculations upon mutability with a deliberate sans-culottish desire to overthrow the hierarchies and values of the old century. A generation had passed, however, and power, once in the preserve of the landed class alone, was now possessed by new capital. Science and scientific knowledge had advanced – partly in the universities, quite largely outside them. It was by no means certain that the comfortable upper-middle class, which was the backbone, intellectually, politically, socially, of Victorian England, any longer needed the Bible, or its God.
In his 1844 essay on ‘The Variation of Organic Beings’, having established how humanity improves plants and animals by means of selective breeding, Darwin posited just such selective process at work in nature as being the work of the Creator.
Let us now suppose a Being with penetration sufficient to perceive differences in the outer and innermost organization quite imperceptible to man, and with forethought extending over future centuries to watch with unerring care and select for any object the offspring of an organism produced under the foregoing circumstances. I can see no conceivable reason why he could not form a new race (or several were he to separate the stock of the original organism and work on several islands) adapted to new ends.5
But although Darwin here pays lip-service to the idea of a Creator, and although Christians who believe in the theory fall back on this, they do so by overlooking what is shocking about Darwinism, what is destructive to faith. In the very next paragraph after he had supposed there was a ‘Being’ who had devised natural selection as the ‘creative’ process, Darwin was referring to ‘this imaginary Being’6 and by the time Origin of Species was first published, incorporating much of this material, the imaginary Being has been replaced with the word ‘Nature’.7 Philosophically speaking, at least since Spinoza had coined his simple and destructive phrase Deus sive Natura, there had been a usage of the word ‘God’ which was a form of scientific laziness. It meant ‘There appears to be such and such a complex organism or astronomical phenomenon – how do we account for it? why, God made it so.’ That having been said, nature does follow ‘laws’ whatever theology we embrace or discard. The species theory developed by Darwin has no direct bearing on physics, nor on the extraordinary complexity and neatness of the solar system. Within the sphere of biology, however, it does appear to remove any necessity for religious explanations. In a sense once it has been espoused, his evolutionary system was essentially destructive to theology, since to personalize the ‘imaginary Being’ who allows or moves or permeates, or who set in motion the process, is merely to be indulging in tautology. In old time it was said You Cannot Serve God and Mammon. The Victorians in general, Darwin’s rentier class in particular, had no doubts, given that not very difficult choice, which of the two they served. Having decided to worship Mammon they had little enough room for its demanding Alternative. The theory of natural selection neatly smothered this troubling Alternative (who in the old book had called for the feeding of the poor, the clothing of the naked, the establishment of justice on earth). Darwin would conclude his 1844 essay, as he would his 1859 book, with the claim that ‘there is a simple grandeur’ in the theory. Darwin, however, by 1844 no more really believed in the creative power of God than a frock-coated Victorian gentleman, climbing into his carriage to be taken to a well-rendered Morning Prayer on Sunday morning, took seriously the ragamuffin Gospel injunction to sell all and give to the poor. The silences of Darwin, which his servants so fascinatedly observed, were present also in his prose, even in his notebooks, even when in rhetorical flourishes he was trying to reassure himself that there was ‘grandeur’ in his vision. However we interpret him, it will always be hard to know which caused him the greater anxiety: the fear that his theory might be true – thereby dismissing the God of the Bible, perhaps any God – or the fear that it might be false – thereby diminishing him from the status of greatest scientific mind of the nineteenth century to a mere mortal, one who had tried out an idea of great ingenuity, but, like the majority of scientists in history, one who had not proved his case.
Meanwhile, Emma Darwin, who was establishing the family at Down and managing the household, kept Sunday as a firm duty. She had family prayers at Down House, attended by the servants, the children and her husband. Twice that day for Morning and Evening Prayer, they attended the parish church, sitting in a large pew lined with green baize near the parson’s desk. A small trace of Emma’s nonconformist ancestry was noticed in the phenomenon that whereas the choir and anyone seated sideways to the altar turned east, as to the Heavenly Jerusalem, to say or sing the words of the Creed, the Darwins did not move, so found themselves staring into the eyes of the other churchgoers. Francis Darwin, recollecting this eccentricity of his mother’s, commented, ‘We certainly were not brought up in Low Church or anti-papistical views, and it remains a mystery why we continued to do anything so unnecessary and uncomfortable.’ Parslow, the Darwins’ butler, sang in the choir.8
Francis – who became a botanist in grown-up life – was born in 1848. The children of Charles and Emma Darwin were William (born 1839), Annie (1841), Mary Eleanor (1842), Etty (1843), George (1845), Betty/Bessy (1847), Francis (1848), Leonard (1850), Horace (1851) and Charles (1856). The 1840s were thus dominated, for Emma, by reproduction. Nonetheless, she had time to oversee the reordering of the house and garden, and the day-to-day running of the household. In their time at Down they added a bow window and veranda at the back of the house, a new hall, and the study where Darwin worked for the rest of his life. To stop the intrusion of people walking down the lane which adjoined the property, they lowered the road by two feet and built a flint wall. In the first three years at Down, they also greatly extended the servants’ quarters. A schoolroom, and accommodation for a governess, were a necessity. The somewhat tired sixteen acres of land which surrounded the house became a beautiful garden which was also a botanist’s laboratory and exercise-ground. Along
its north side, beyond a high hedge and shrubbery, was a kitchen garden, surrounded by a high flint-and-brick wall, its beds further protected by box hedges. The south side of this long wall housed the greenhouse. Darwin was challenged by his cousin William Fox to see who could grow the biggest peas from the latest varieties. Each year the crop was carefully measured. On the other side of the long wall was the orchard. Beside the orchard was a red-brick potting shed where Darwin tested his breeding programmes and hybridizations. In addition Darwin leased a strip of land a quarter of a mile from the house from his neighbours the Lubbocks. Sir John Lubbock, squire of the parish, was a Whig banker, mathematician and astronomer. His house was called High Elms. Darwin planted his rented strip with a mixture of hardwoods and had a path made round its perimeter, ever afterwards known as the Sandwalk. Darwin’s children, when they grew up, would remember their father on his ‘thinking path’. Every day at noon, he walked five times round the Sandwalk, swinging a walking stick heavily shod with iron, with which he would strike the ground. The rhythmic click of the stick spoke of his approaching presence.
As well as the five-times circumambulation of the Sandwalk, Darwin would sometimes walk in the woods at dawn. Later in the day, often accompanied by the children, he would walk down the hill to the Big Woods. ‘He seemed to know nearly all the beetles and was immensely interested when any of the rarer sort were found.’ The children grew up close to nature. Francis found ‘something impressive and almost sacred’ in the changing seasons, and they all recalled a father who was ‘the most delightful play-fellow’. When they hid in the shrubbery, he commented, ‘This is analogous to young pigs hiding themselves, and [is the] hereditary remains of savages’ state.’9 Like many family men he had begun to address his wife as if she were his mother – ‘Mammy’.
So the routines – ceaseless work and cordial family relationships – attached themselves like ivy to Down House. The village of Down had never had a parsonage. Down House had been the personal property of a previous parson. Darwin, with his love of the garden, his burgeoning family, his religious wife and regular churchgoing, was, to all outward signs, scarcely distinguishable from the naturalist-clergyman he had intended to become before the Beagle voyage changed his destiny. There was more than purely intellectual curiosity in the face of nature, there was an intensity of delight.
The clover fields are now of a most beautiful pink and from the number of Hive Bees frequenting them, the humming noise is quite extraordinary. Their humming is rather deeper than the humming overhead that has been continuous and loud during the last hot days, over almost every field. The labourers here say it is made by ‘air-bees’ and one man seeing a wild bee in a flower, different from the kind, remarked that ‘no doubt it is an air-bee’. This noise is considered as a sign of settled fair weather . . . There were large tracts of woodland that were cut about every ten years, some of which were very ancient. Larks abounded, and their songs were most agreeable, nightingales were common.10
These observations could have been made by the Revd Gilbert White at Selbourne, though they were recorded by Charles Darwin at Down in June 1844. Yet the same mind – aged only thirty-five – could, in the very next month, jealously and aggressively guard what had become the ‘Darwin’ brand. Here he is writing from Down on 5 July – note the repetition in the first sentence of that possessive pronoun:
My Dear Emma. I have just finished my sketch of my species theory. If, as I believe that my theory is true and if it be accepted even by one competent judge, it will be a considerable step in science. I therefore write this, in case of my sudden death, as my most solemn & last request, which I am sure you will consider the same as if legally entered in my will, that you will devote 400£ to its publication & further with yourself, or through Hensleigh [her brother] take trouble in promoting it.11
And so on, at great length, including the request to get Lyell to edit it. It is a remarkable letter. Presumably his wretched state of health made him feel likelier than most mortals, despite his youth, to die prematurely. It prompts the question, however, why, if he cared so passionately about ‘his’ theory, he did not publish his essay ‘The Variation of Organic Beings’. It is a perfectly coherent work of 164 printed pages (in Sir Gavin de Beer’s learned edition published in 1958).
It is, in essence, a shorter version of The Origin of Species which, fifteen years in the future, he would publish. One reason for not publishing, unquestionably, was the state of his health. To a Swiss correspondent, Adolph von Morlot, stratigrapher and archaeologist, who had written to him that summer on the old question of boulders and glaciers, Darwin had said, ‘My health during the last three years has been exceedingly weak, so that I am able to work only two or three hours in the 24.’12
One can imagine a scientist of a temper less cautious than Darwin’s, however, publishing the essay in an almost interrogating tone: what if this theory of the transmutation of species occurred in this way? What do my colleagues think of it? What are the objections to the theory, beyond non-scientific blind prejudice? How does it match what we know of fossil evidence?
This, though, was not Darwin’s way. He wanted to establish it as his theory, and although he told his wife that he believed it was true, he knew he could not yet prove it beyond reasonable doubt. So he hesitated.
There was also, naturally enough, an element of prudent fear holding him back. The theory had not yet led Darwin himself to a complete rejection of Christianity, though he could feel belief ebbing away. He was aware that figures whom he esteemed in the scientific world, such as Professor Sedgwick at Cambridge or Dean Buckland, would deplore the materialism of the theory. Did Darwin, reclusive, shy, neurotic, prone to ‘stomachic catastrophe’, have the temperament to weather the controversy which publication of such a theory would inevitably ignite? So Hamlet paced the Sandwalk of Elsinore/Down, and the essay though completed by the summer of 1844 was unpublished.
Thought of his own death, before ‘his’ theory was shown to the world as Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, had been enough to make him pen the nervous letter to Emma. What he could not have foreseen was that in the autumn of that very year, with the noise of trumpets, and the razzmatazz of a publishing genius, a book was about to shock Victorian England to the core, with an energetic survey of the current state of scientific knowledge and a promotion of the evolutionary idea.
In October 1844, a total of 150 persons of influence were sent a book, free of charge, at the request of its anonymous author. Its title was Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. The only name to appear on its title page was that of the publisher, John Churchill of Princes Street, Soho. Although Churchill was a religious man, attending chapel twice every Sunday, his list of publications included various titles considered at the time to be outré, including a translation of Friedrich Tiedemann’s A Systematic Treatise on Comparative Physiology (1834), a work which advocated serial transformation, a gradual evolutionary process at work in nature. Churchill had received brickbats for publishing (very successfully) a popular work of anatomy by William Carpenter – Principles of Human Physiology – which had openly declared a belief in a machine-run universe with no need of a Creator. Churchill had the nonconformist’s belief in speaking one’s mind and a clever publisher’s eye to the main chance. He was also good at keeping secrets, which was why the author approached him in the first instance. Even so, Churchill was kept in the dark about the author’s true identity. All correspondence about the publication of Vestiges had to be conducted via Alexander Ireland in Manchester, a journalist who was a champion of new fads and advanced ideas such as phrenology and mesmerism.
Ireland had the good journalist’s ability to create a story. It was presumably he who, having started the storm of excitement on the book’s publication, began the rumour that the mystery author might be none other than Prince Albert.13 Even though this particular idea might have been fanciful hindsight on Ireland’s part, there was still a highly satisfactory buzz of excitement, first in Lo
ndon, then throughout literate England, about the book, its adventurous contents and its unknown author. When Sedgwick was eventually persuaded to read and ultimately to review Vestiges, he told Lyell, ‘I cannot but think the work is from a woman’s pen, it is so well dressed . . . I do not think the “beast man” could have done this part so well.’ The author’s reading was extensive but ‘very shallow’ – another sign of feminine origin. In his notice in the Edinburgh Review he developed the thought, even likening the impulsive female author to Eve in the Garden of Paradise. She ‘leaps to a conclusion as if the toilsome way up the hill of Truth were to be passed with the light skip of an opera-dancer. This mistake was woman’s from the first. She longed for the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and she must pluck it right or wrong.’14
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was, and is, an immediately readable and superbly comprehensive work of natural science. Though Sedgwick would dismiss it, in conversation with another Fellow of Trinity, as ‘rank materialism’,15 its very title pays lip-service, at least, to the traditional explanation for the origin of all things. ‘Science leaves us, but only to conclude, from other grounds, that there is a First Cause to which all others are secondary and ministrative, a primitive almighty will, of which these laws are merely the mandates. That great Being, who shall say where is his dwelling place, or what his history! Man pauses breathless at the contemplation of a subject so far above his finite faculties, and only can wonder and adore!’16
Vestiges in fact was to say that theology and metaphysics on the one hand had their sphere, in which the author chose, respectfully, not to dabble, while science and the march of mind had theirs. This book is a sort of popular Humboldt’s Kosmos, a compendium for the ever-expanding book-reading and book-buying public, of the current state of scientific knowledge. It is a book which a brisk reader could easily digest in two or three evenings, or – going more slowly – in a week. By the time you had read it, you would have been conducted through the marvels of astronomy, as revealed by Herschel’s telescopes. You would have been given a potted history of geology, largely culled from Lyell, and you would recognize the great antiquity of the earth – of far greater antiquity than the conventional method of reading the Bible would imply. From the fossil records you would start to see the multitude of species no longer to be found on this planet. You would then be asked to speculate on that most momentous of questions, the origin of present species, noting an advance, in both plants and animals, ‘along the line leading to the higher forms of organization’.17 As in geology, so in biology, we should look not for direct divine intervention to explain the development of things, but rather for ‘natural laws which are expressions of his will’. The author saw the evolution of life, the gradual transmutation of one species into another, almost like an embodiment of Ovid’s metamorphoses myths.18 Alluding to old eighteenth-century Lord Monboddo’s ‘much ridiculed’ theory that mankind evolved from monkeys, the author pointed out that fossil evidence now suggests just such a possibility.19 ‘The whole train of animated beings, from the simplest and oldest up to the highest and most recent, are then, to be regarded as a series of advances of the principle of development.’20 The last hundred pages of the book, drawing heavily upon Lamarck, while mocking Lamarck’s conclusions, but also on the work of contemporary medics, anatomists and biologists, see biology and history as an everlasting progress or improvement. Though the early Victorian reader might be dismayed to be shaken in the old Bible certainties, might indeed even feel horrified by the sheer size and pitilessness of the universe depicted here, the investor in Vestiges could end on a note of uplift. The story had begun violently, with the clash of meteoric substances in the furthest reaches of space. Earth had crashed with volcanic eruptions. Lumbering prehistoric monsters then vied for mastery. This story would end in brightness.
