by A. N. Wilson
John Phillips, a young Cornish mining engineer and geologist and Professor of Metallurgy at the College for Civil Engineers at Putney, is quoted as saying, ‘There is no break in the vast chain of organic development till we reached the existing order of things.’21 In the end, after the long march of monsters and apes and primitive men, came ‘civilization’. In the end, came the Victorians. War did not cease, but ‘shrinks into a comparatively narrow compass’.22 The sex passion no doubt ‘leads to great evils’. But ‘the civilized man is more able to give it due control’.23 There could be no evidence that Victorians had evil ‘sex passion’ under more control than, say, men and women in the time of Oliver Cromwell, but in the optimistic mood of its closing pages Vestiges saw everything as an improvement. The author does not mention the Reform Act of 1832. Somehow there is no need to emphasize the idea. What had begun as a work of popular science had ended like Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, as a work of supreme collective self-satisfaction.
It is not clear why Darwin was not in a position to buy a copy of Vestiges. True, the first print run of 750, of which 150 had been given away, was sold out quickly, but he could surely have laid hands upon a copy to purchase. Instead, he went to study it in the Reading Room of the British Museum at the close of the year 1844. It was a very great shock to his system. Since Blyth had been safely dispatched to India in 1841, Darwin, shrouded for much of the time in domesticity or the even tighter womb-wall of invalidism, had worked steadily, sharing his views on transmutation with very few intimate scientific colleagues: Jenyns, Lyell, Hooker . . . In all the speculation about the possible authorship of Vestiges, his name had not been mooted because he had not yet come out as a transmutationist, and his fame, such as it was, rested on his Voyage and (chiefly) his geology. He had quietly allowed himself to make his particular version of transmutation his own. It was ‘my theory’.
The anonymity of the author of Vestiges added to the book’s appeal. On the one hand, the anonymity suggested that the contents of the book were too dangerous to be owned. On the other hand, was there not a sense in which anonymity conveyed something larger than the individual, as if the author spoke for the Age? Sedgwick in his intemperate review (Whewell said of it, ‘the material appears excellent, but the workmanship bad, and I doubt if it will do its work’)24 was also anonymous. He spoke, likewise, not only for himself, but for the old world when he told readers of the Edinburgh Review: ‘If the book be true, then the labours of sober induction are in vain; religion is a lie; human law is a mass of folly, and a base injustice; morality is moonshine; our labours for the black people of Africa were works of madmen; and man and woman are only better beasts.’ Who, having read such a review, could resist purchasing the book? Yet Darwin, reading it in the library, knew that these words came from his old friend and tutor Sedgwick, who had taken him on a geological tour of Wales. Could timid, albeit passive-aggressive Darwin endure such a reproof from a Cambridge professor? Could he subject Emma to the knowledge that his views reduced morality to moonshine? When the author of Vestiges, a father of eleven children, was asked by a knowing friend why he did not acknowledge authorship, he said there were eleven reasons.25
The author was a clever Edinburgh journalist, publisher and bookseller named Robert Chambers (1802–71). His father had been a cotton manufacturer who went bankrupt, but who had instilled in Robert and his brother William a love of books and learning. Robert had read the whole of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as a boy and would go on, in the 1860s, to oversee the publication of Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge. His early years in Edinburgh as a hack writer had been derided by Sir Walter Scott and by his son-in-law John Gibson Lockhart – editor of the Quarterly Review (the Tory rival to the Whig Edinburgh). Chambers, however, who wrote an unauthorized life of Scott, had learnt a thing or two from Sir Walter, and one of these was the appeal of anonymous publication. Scott’s first novels were all published anonymously, and curiosity about the author’s identity quickened the public appetite for the books themselves. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, a low-priced educational weekly, was a publishing sensation when it began in the year of Scott’s death, 1832. By April of that year it was selling 32,000 a week.
Darwin, as he sat reading Vestiges of Creation in the British Museum, was brought face to face with the uncomfortable truth that its general underlying ideas were not original. Chambers was not a scientist, but a clever man who had read Lyell, Lamarck and the majority of published scientists. Like any layman (like most scientists, come to that) he made some mistakes. Broadly, though, he scooped Darwin. What Darwin must have seen, as he anxiously read Vestiges, was the basic unoriginality of his own mind. Chambers, anonymously, but with tremendous pace and brio, spelt out a natural origin for species in a framework of purely material causation. This was an idea which might find resistance among older scientists and theologians, but for the majority of minds in the nineteenth century it was irresistible. The only big remaining question was: if Lamarck was wrong about the method by which species evolved, what alternative theory could be found?
The actual method by which nature went to work, allowing some species to become extinct while others mysteriously refined themselves and strengthened themselves, was one which still eluded the scientific mind. Any reader of Vestiges, however, could see that this idea, of mutation, development, evolution, was central to the Victorian mind-set. A year after Vestiges was published, the spellbinding Fellow of Oriel and Vicar of St Mary’s Oxford, John Henry Newman, wrote a book on The Development of Christian Doctrine, attempting to explain how the modern Church, so apparently different in ethos and practice from early Christianity, had reached its current position. Newman in old age must have read with mixed emotions a letter from his feline ex-disciple Mark Pattison – by then the agnostic, cynical Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford – who wrote to his old master, ‘Is it not a remarkable thing that you should have first started the idea – and the word – Development, as the key to the history of church doctrine, and since then it has gradually become the dominant idea of all history, biology, physics and in short has metamorphosed our view of every science, and of all knowledge?’26 The very fact that Pattison got it all slightly wrong – Hegel, surely, if anyone, and not Newman was the greatest proponent of development philosophy – shows that the development idea was in the air. For once the over-used word Zeitgeist is useful. Darwin, who lived in a bubble, did not quite realize, until he read Vestiges, how much of a symptom of the Zeitgeist he was. Darwin’s friend Henslow wrote breezily in December 1844, ‘I have been delighted with Vestiges, from the multiplicity of facts he brings together, though I do [not] agree with his conclusions at all, he must be a funny fellow.’27 Rather heavily, after Christmas, Darwin answered, ‘I have also read the Vestiges, but have been somewhat less amused at it, than you appear to have been.’28 His driving ambition, to become the English Humboldt, was frustrated. With many a groan, he would rush to the privy which had been rigged up behind a curtain in his study at Down. When gastric upset permitted, he resumed his patient and exhaustive study of the barnacle.
The anonymous author of Vestiges having pipped him to the post as the popularizer of evolution, Darwin decided to pare his Journal of Researches from its two naval companions – the accounts of Captains FitzRoy and King – and to issue his account of his voyage of HMS Beagle as a separate volume with a commercial publisher. Lyell introduced him to John Murray, his own publisher. It was the house which published the Quarterly Review. In an earlier generation, John Murray II had published Jane Austen and Lord Byron. This John Murray – the III – had published Lyell. Educated at Edinburgh University, he was well versed in science. He would have noted that in this revised, second edition of the Beagle journal, Darwin had introduced evolutionary reflections which were absent from the first published version. On the Galápagos archipelago, he had added:
Considering the small size of the islands, we feel the more astonished at the number of their aborigin
al beings, and at their confined range. Seeing every height crowned with its crater, and the boundaries of most of the lava-stream still distinct, we are led to believe that within a period, geologically recent, the unbroken ocean was here spread out. Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact – that mystery of mysteries – the first appearance of new beings on this earth.29
He incorporated into the book matter from his published work on the zoology and geology of the voyage, while reducing the number of words in the book by cutting descriptive passages. Darwin sold the copyright to Murray for £150 and the book was published with the title Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited during the Voyage of HMS Beagle Round the World. Between 1 January 1847 and January 1848 Murray sold 236 copies: the total number sold, including the early edition, was 4,100.30 Not a great sale, but it was satisfying to see the Beagle reflections detached from those of Captain FitzRoy. The real work, however, in the late 1840s, was on the barnacles. As far as his relationship with the firm of Murray was concerned, the early stages of working with them were unfortunate. In addition to his Beagle journal, Murray was the publisher of the Admiralty’s Manual of Scientific Enquiry to which Darwin had contributed the chapter on geology. By a printer’s error, two pages of Darwin’s chapter were transposed. It was highly characteristic of Darwin, both that he was tortured by being associated with error and that he felt extreme personal sympathy for the printer responsible. ‘Do you chance to know’, he asked Murray, ‘whether the unfortunate Reader or head Compositor will be fined heavily, for I cannot bear the thought of this, & if you happen to know that such is the case & would out of charity direct one of the clerks to inform me I would write to Mr Clowes [the head of the printing firm] & make the poor workman some present.’31
As for the barnacle studies, these had begun on board the Beagle. Of the 1,529 species bottled in wine spirits and sent back from the voyage to London, there was a single bottle containing over a dozen very rare, tiny South American barnacles.32 What made them rare? Up to 1830 barnacles had been defined by the shape of their shell houses and not by their softer bodies. The Chilean barnacle Darwin collected had no house of its own, no cone-house or stalk. By the 1840s many naturalists, thanks to the dramatic improvement in the quality of microscopes, had begun to work on the smaller creatures of the sea. T. H. Huxley, the assistant ship’s surgeon on HMS Rattlesnake bound for Sydney via the Cape, was at work on molluscs. Edward Forbes, lecturer in botany at King’s College, had written a book on starfish, and was about to write A Monograph of the British Naked-Eyed Medusae – jellyfish.
The fascination of the barnacles, for Darwin, was that they were small enough, collectable enough and perhaps in a sufficient state of transition to serve as potentially useful demonstrations of species mutation. If the species theory were true, then the human race, and all other animal life-forms on the planet, had developed from some marine invertebrate such as the barnacle. Darwin’s interest in marine zoology went right back to his Edinburgh days as a student with Drs Grant and Coldstream, but the barnacle research began in earnest in 1846 and continued for a good eight years until, in 1854, he completed his monograph on pedunculated cirripedes. The work demonstrated, among other things, Darwin’s prodigious skill in the art of anatomical dissection, for he was able to demonstrate features of barnacle life which had never previously been guessed at. For example, he discovered the existence of an ur- or proto-eye with a pair of tiny ophthalmic ganglia in adult Lepads. Organs which could later develop as potential means of hearing and smelling were also detectable. Rightly did he receive the Royal Medal of the Royal Society of London in 1853 for his work on the barnacle. The work had been exhaustive and exhausting. It put him in touch with a whole network of scientific researchers throughout the world, for there was almost literally not a stone unturned in his analysis of ‘Mr Arthrobalanus’: a creature no bigger than a pin-head which could be dissected only under the microscope.
It was Owen who had suggested that Darwin make a comparison between Arthrobalanus and other species. As well as the work putting him in touch with scientists in Europe and Australia, he enlisted the help of his old servant Syms Covington, now settled, with a family in Sydney, from whom he had not heard in years. ‘I am now employed on a large volume, describing the anatomy and all the species of barnacles from all over the world. I do not know whether you live near the sea, but if so I should be very glad if you would collect me any that adhere (small and large) to the coast rocks or to shells and corals thrown up by gales.’33 Luckily for Darwin, Covington came up trumps. Darwin acknowledged that his old servant had taken great trouble to search for specimens and was able to tell him he had found ‘a new species of genus of which only one specimen is known to exist in the world, and it is in the British Museum’. (The ‘curious’ specimen was probably Catophragmus polymerus.)34
In acknowledging this valuable specimen, Darwin confided in Covington,
You have an immense, incalculable advantage in living in a country in which your children are sure to get on if industrious. I assure you that, though I am a rich man, when I think of the future I very often ardently wish I was settled in one of our Colonies, for I have now four sons (seven children in all and more coming) and what on earth to bring them up to I do not know. A young man may here slave for years in any profession and not make a penny.35
Darwin’s really innovative discovery about the barnacle was its hermaphrodite sexuality. In the genus Ibla he found a species in which small rudimentary males were parasitic on the female, and in both Ibla and Scalpellum he found ‘complemental’ males attached not to a female but to a hermaphrodite. This discovery was unique in the animal kingdom, and it was clearly of the first relevance in determining the pattern of evolution: as he put it in his finished monograph, Living Cirripedia, ‘how gradually nature changes from one condition to another, in this case from bisexuality to unisexuality’.36 It was as if – the comparison is mine, not Darwin’s – the myth of human sexuality expounded in Plato’s Symposium was being played out beneath the lens of his microscope. By April 1848 he could tell Henslow:
all the Cirripedia are bisexual, except one genus, & in this the female has the ordinary appearance, whereas the male has no one part of its body like the female & is microscopically minute; but here comes the odd fact, the male, or sometimes two males, at the instance they cease being locomotive larvae become parasitic within the sack of the female, & thus fixed & half embedded in the flesh of their wives they pass their whole lives & can never move again.37
So he mused to Henslow, in 1848, as he himself became increasingly incapacitated by his mystery illness and ever more dependent upon Emma, whom he now openly called ‘Mammy’.
Nothing so forcefully reminds a grown man of his unfulfilled childhood gaps than the death of a parent. Having been motherless since 1817, on 13 November 1848 Darwin lost his father. Robert Darwin, immense in height and weight, bronchitic and well past his eightieth year, had been failing for months. For most of the summer he had been bed-bound, or confined to a wheelchair in his Shrewsbury hothouse. Darwin had visited his father in May 1848, clearly expecting him to die soon. Emma, heavily pregnant with her son Francis (who was born on 16 August), was unable to accompany him, not least because her ‘baby’ George (less than three) was ill and keeping her awake at nights.38 Darwin himself, once installed in The Mount, threw himself on his sisters’ nursing skills but, as he wrote to ‘my dearest dear old Mammy . . . today am languid and stomach bad . . . Without you, when sick I feel most desolate.’39 ‘My poor Father had a wretched night last . . . Oh Mammy I do long to be with you, & under your protection.’40 Darwin returned to Down and remained there for the rest of the year until his sister Emily Catherine wrote of their father, ‘he is weaker and weaker . . . there is no sign of rallying’.41 When the old man died, on the Monday of that week, the 13th, the sisters arranged the funeral to give their brothers Erasmus and Charles ti
me to reach Shrewsbury by Friday.
