Charles Darwin

by A. N. Wilson

  Most of the old lady’s servants, with their broad Staffordshire voices, were sent back to Barlaston to work in Frank’s household. Darwin noted nervously that ‘she has left a great deal of money’, adding with perhaps a sense of let-down, ‘to very many Charities’. Like Emma, Aunt Sarah had no social dealings outside the family. ‘She had no gift for intercourse with her neighbours, rich or poor,’ Etty Darwin remembered, ‘and I do not believe ever visited in the village.’28 Her failure to visit the poor was a matter of choice. Class surely played its part in her failure to visit, or to be invited by, the rich. Whereas in the towns, nouveaux riches moved relatively easily from one house to another, not pausing too much to ask the age of the money which bought the house in the country, there were still invisible but palpable hierarchies. A married couple might venture together upon their ascent, but an old spinster was safer at home among her own kind.

  Emma’s reasons for not mixing were more to do with family preoccupations than with the shyness of rank-category. The baby Charles was backward in learning to walk and talk. He was a solemn little person. He cried less than any of their babies, but he had no high spirits. It was clear that something was wrong with him from the beginning.

  The sheltered childhood of Darwin’s children continued its inward course. Darwin realized he had made a mistake sending his eldest boy William to Rugby – which he had done on the recommendation of Hensleigh, who had sent his eldest there. In spite of claiming to be ‘glad to hear of your sixth form power’,29 Darwin was so absorbed in his own work that he seldom wrote to the boy and had no sympathy with the public-school ethos or with its all but exclusively classical syllabus. The headmaster was a dull young man called Goulburn (‘a very mild fellow’, as one Rugby master described him) under whose headship the school shrank in numbers. Much of the syllabus consisted in learning Latin verse and passages of the Bible by heart.30 When he surfaced from his own work to consider the reality of this, Darwin said he could not endure ‘to think of sending my boys to waste 7 or 8 years in making miserable Latin verses’.31 The remaining boys were sent to Clapham Grammar School, a scientifically minded place whose head, Charles Pritchard, later became Professor of Astronomy at Oxford.32

  The girls were kept at home at Down House, as was normal for the daughters of gentry. ‘My mother took very little trouble about our education, and I was frankly bored with schoolroom lessons and schoolroom life,’ Etty remembered. ‘My aim was to escape as soon as possible either to look after some of my many pet animals, or to get a quiet corner to read.’33 Playmates, when not her direct siblings, were visiting cousins. The girls were taught no science or mathematics. Etty believed her sister Elizabeth (Bessy or Lizzie) to have had some handicap such as cerebral palsy, though there survives no evidence to prove this. A succession of more or less inadequate governesses, as dithery and hopeless as those in an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel, came and went: after Miss Thorley her sister, Miss Emily Thorley (a ‘magnet for unstable women’, Etty later decided, which was presumably a phrase to cover lesbian inclination); then Miss Pugh, who wept at meals and was carted off to an asylum; Madame Grut, who left after only a few weeks, having quarrelled with Darwin; the beautiful German Miss Ludwig, with whom the twelve-year-old Horace fell in love, and who translated Darwin’s correspondence into her native tongue. One of the governesses complained that the children used ‘very bad language, so bad that she hardly liked to repeat it’. When told to convey the offending phrase on paper, she wrote, ‘By George’.34

  While the family pursued its life, Emma effected changes to the house. The year 1857 saw the construction of a new dining-room on the side of the house – later it became a drawing-room.35

  Darwin’s correspondence took up more and more time. Apart from his experiments with hybrid pigeons and other specimens, and his long slow cogitations on the Sandwalk, letter-writing – and letter-reading – was his means of retaining academic contacts. The regular visit of the postman enabled what was in effect a decades-long seminar with Blyth, Hooker, Huxley, Lyell, Henslow as the principal participants, Hewlett Cottrell Watson (botanist and phytogeographer), Herbert Spencer (journalist and thinker), John Lubbock (Darwin’s neighbour, a politician and keen natural scientist), Thomas Eyton (a Shropshire naturalist), George Bentham (botanist) and others as keen occasional contributors. A key figure who entered the postal seminar in 1856 was Asa Gray, the Fischer Professor of Natural History at Harvard.

  Gray was preparing a paper – ‘Statistics of the Flora of the Northern United States’ – and he wrote to acknowledge his indebtedness to Darwin’s work. Darwin replied, in May 1856, at some length with suggestions and questions: ‘With respect to naturalised plants; are any social with you, which are not so in their parent country?’36 Gray was, like almost all Darwin’s correspondents, subject to the lines of inquiry which all related to the theme of themes: adaptation and mutation of species, how and in what circumstance this phenomenon occurred. Gray replied in punctilious detail.

  ‘It is extremely kind of you to say that my letters have not bored you very much,’ Darwin wrote, ‘& it is almost incredible to me, for I am quite conscious that my speculations are quite beyond the bounds of true science.’ The correspondence with a fellow truth-seeker whom he had never met created intellectual intimacy, so much so that in July 1857 Darwin opened his mind to the American botanist:

  Nineteen years (!) ago it occurred to me that whilst otherwise employed on Nat. Hist, I might perhaps do good if I noted any sort of facts bearing on the question of the origin of species . . . I think it can be shown to be probable that man gets his most distinct varieties by preserving such as arise best worth keeping and destroying the others. I assume that species arise like our domestic varieties with much extinction; & then test this hypothesis by comparison with as many general & pretty well established propositions as I can find made out, – in geograph. distribution, geological history – affinities &c. &c. &c. And it seems to me, that supposing that such hypothesis were to explain general propositions, we ought, in accordance with common way of following all sciences, to admit it, till some better hypothesis be found out.37

  In concluding a long letter, he apologized for being ‘horribly egotistical’.38 He followed it, in September, with a four-page abstract of his idea and the motto which ‘most satisfactorily’ answers most of the objections: Natura non facit saltum.39 Nature does not jump, it proceeds gradually. Gray’s reply is lost, but Darwin’s response to it suggests an initial degree of scepticism on the Harvard professor’s part: ‘What you hint at generally is very very true, that my work will be grievously hypothetical & large parts by no means worthy of being called inductive; my commonest error being probably induction from too few facts.’40

  Darwin wanted the response to his theory from scientists whom he respected. He was ready to listen to Gray even if the American botanist disagreed with him. Helpful criticism could only be welcome, since, despite having worked on his theory for nearly twenty years, he did not want to make it public until its validity had been tested as thoroughly as it could be. A particular dread was that a ‘popular scientist’ such as the author of Vestiges would catch wind of the theory and publish a clumsy or distorted version of it. For this reason, he implored Gray to keep the ideas of natural selection to himself: ‘If anyone like the Author of Vestiges, were to hear of them, he might easily work them in, & I then shd. have to quote from a work perhaps despised by naturalists & this would greatly injure any chance of my views being received by those alone whose opinion I value.’41

  Only three weeks later, on 27 September 1857, Darwin received a letter from the Malayan Archipelago from an amateur naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace. Only a tiny fragment of this letter survives. It refers to a letter which Darwin had written to Wallace in May 1855 praising his paper ‘On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species’. This was an evolutionary tract which posited that ‘every species has come into existence coincident both in time and space with a pre-
existing closely allied species’. Wallace was therefore very close indeed to Darwin’s own views of evolution. What he had not yet developed was a theory of how species evolved. The fragment of Wallace’s September 1857 letter has been heavily annotated by Darwin, who did not reply to it until 22 December.

  You say that you have been somewhat surprised at no notice having been taken of your paper in the Annals. I cannot say that I am; for so few naturalists care for anything beyond the mere description of species. But you must not suppose that your paper has not been attended to: two very good men, Sir C. Lyell & Mr E. Blyth at Calcutta specially called my attention to it. Though agreeing with you on your conclusion[s] in that paper, I believe I go much further than you; but it is too long a subject to enter on my speculative notions.42

  Darwin was not giving anything away. Whereas, in strictest confidence, he was prepared to divulge his theory of natural selection to a Harvard professor, he was understandably cautious about what he wrote to a stranger.

  Wallace (1823–1913), fourteen years younger than Darwin, had not enjoyed the elder man’s privileges. He was born in Usk, Monmouthshire, where his father was so careless as not to notice that the child’s middle name, Russell, had been spelt Russel in the baptismal register. Wallace retained the misspelling throughout his life. Newman Noggs, the lawyer’s clerk in Nicholas Nickleby, another decayed gentleman, declared, ‘I have forgotten all my old ways. My spelling may have gone with them’43 (‘Mr Noggs kept his horses and hounds once’).44 The Wallaces had been swept into the socially downward capitalist drift. When the family moved to Hertford, Alfred Russel was sent to the grammar school, but worked as a pupil-teacher aged thirteen in lieu of fees. When he was fourteen he left school and went with his brother William to London where he learnt to be a surveyor and mastered the rudiments of geology. The next year, he spent as the apprentice to a watchmaker in Leighton Buzzard. Then he followed his brother into Herefordshire, worked as a surveyor and studied astronomy and botany in his spare time. His father died when Alfred was eighteen. His brother’s surveying work was not bringing in enough to feed two, so Alfred took a job as a master at the collegiate school in Leicester.

  It was in Leicester that Wallace made friends with another amateur naturalist called Henry Walter Bates (1825–92), who had started work as an apprentice in a hosiery warehouse and gained his scientific education at the Mechanics Institute. These Institutes were a post-war innovation of the 1820s and were a vital ingredient in the Victorian technological success story. By the 1850s, there were over 700 of them and they were to be found in most of the towns and cities of Britain. Charitable endowments, they had their own buildings which served as technical schools – teaching engineering and other skills – libraries and museums. They were the forerunners of the polytechnics.

  One of the high points of Henry Bates’s teenage years had been the exhibition at the New Hall in Leicester, showing ‘preserved specimens of Foreign and English quadrupeds, birds and insects’. The sixpence entry fee opened his eyes to the possibility of becoming a full-time natural historian, and in the leisure hours of his later teens, when he was not being an aspirant hosier, he was collecting bugs and butterflies in Charnwood Forest. His father, who was successful in business and was rising in the world, encouraged his son’s enthusiasms, and these continued after Bates had completed his apprenticeship, abandoned hosiery and taken a job at Allsopp’s Brewery in Burton upon Trent.45

  A little before his move to the brewery, Bates met Wallace, and the two men began a friendship based on a shared love of natural history. Bates introduced Wallace to entomology. It was also about this time that Wallace read Malthus’s Essay on Population; the experience would eventually lead him to an idea of evolution by the process of natural selection which was all but identical to Darwin’s. Wallace and Bates, despite their modest means, formed the bold ambition to explore the Amazon, defraying their expenses by the sale of specimens to scientists and museums back home. They set sail in April 1848 and by March 1850 they had quarrelled irreconcilably and parted company. Wallace was joined on his Amazonian adventures by his brother Herbert, who died of yellow fever in 1851. This was not the only calamity to befall Wallace. After four years in Brazil, he turned for home. The ship which bore him, the 235-ton brig Helen, contained all his notes, all his specimens and a cargo of 120 tons of rubber as well as cocoa, red annatto dye, piaçaba fibres and aromatic balsam. It was this last which began to smoulder in the heat and to turn into a bubbling cauldron after three weeks at sea. The Captain made the mistake of opening the hatches to quench the smoke, but in doing so he gave air to the fire, and the smouldering balsam burst into flames. The ship was 700 miles from Bermuda and managed to sail on, despite the fire, for another 500 miles before being rescued by a cargo ship, the Jordeson, bound from Cuba to London. Wallace lost, not only all his notes on the natural history of the Amazon, but also the specimens which would have financed the last lap of his journey. Some of his specimens had been sent to London in advance, so that in 1851, by the time he was back in England, Wallace was no longer a figure entirely unknown to the scientific establishment. He realized that the only way of continuing his life as a scientist-collector was to press on. So in 1854 he set off on an altogether different venture: to the Malayan Archipelago, where he would spend the next eight years. As he told his brother-in-law, he was determined to remain there until he had solved the ‘whole problem’ of the Archipelago, above all the puzzle of the zoological distinction between creatures who lived on either side of the strait between Bali and Lombok, later known as Wallace’s Line.

  It was a slow journey, but Wallace was advancing into a fully committed evolutionist. The question for him, as for any of his predecessors in the field, was how? Some of the dogged resistance to the idea of mutation in species came, in the scientific academy, from blind prejudice. Much of it, however, derived from the simple fact that no one except Lamarck had ventured to account for the process of mutation. Lamarck’s theory had serious flaws. Then – how? In 1858, Wallace was struck down by an attack of fever at Ternate, in the Moluccas. It was while the fever was upon him that he recalled his reading of Malthus, and the actual method of natural selection flashed upon Wallace’s mind. It took him only a few hours of concentrated thought. Over the next two days, he wrote down his idea. There was only one man in the world with whom he wished to share it, and he posted his hastily composed essay to Down House.

  For Darwin himself, Wallace’s letter from the Moluccas came as potential calamity, at least as far as his claim to be the originator of the theory was concerned.

  Both men, Darwin and Wallace, behaved with honour: both realized that they had arrived at the theory independently. Wallace saw that Darwin had, in fact, thought of it before him. Darwin, while wanting this to be recognized, did not wish to diminish Wallace’s achievement. Darwin might imagine Wallace saying, ‘you did not intend publishing an abstract of your views till you received my communication, is it fair to take advantage of my having freely, though unasked, communicated to you my ideas, & thus prevent me forestalling you?’46

  Darwin turned, as to a wise old Nestor, to Lyell, who came up with a solution of whose sagacity Jeeves himself would have been proud. Together with Hooker, he wrote to the Linnean Society setting out the story. Nothing could have been more appropriate than to make known the theory to that learned society, adjacent to the Royal Academy in Burlington House, Piccadilly, devoted to the memory of the great Swedish taxonomist of the eighteenth century. It was Linnaeus, after all, who had been the first scientist in modern times to devise a system of classifying flora and fauna by species, thereby laying the groundwork for later scientists to investigate their origin. The Linnean Society, even more than the Royal Society, contained the great eminences of British biology. To them, Lyell and Hooker sent their joint letter, presenting ‘the investigations of two indefatigable naturalists, Mr Charles Darwin and Mr Alfred Wallace’. They sent extracts from Darwin’s essays on species, ‘a very
brief abstract of my theory’ in 1842, some thirty-five pages, and the longer one, some 230 pages in 1844 – the last, in some ways, being the purest and most condensed version of the theory Darwin ever composed.47 They included an abstract of Darwin’s letter to Asa Gray written in September 1857 which not only repeated the hypothesis but made it clear that Darwin was engaged upon writing it up in book form. They sent these together with ‘An Essay by Mr Wallace entitled “On the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type”. This was written at Ternate in February 1858 for the perusal of his friend and correspondent Mr Darwin, and sent to him with the expressed wish that it should be forwarded to Sir Charles Lyell, if Mr Darwin thought it sufficiently novel and interesting.’48

  11

  A Poker and a Rabbit

  SO LYELL AND J. D. Hooker would present the papers of Wallace and of Darwin to the Linnean Society as a joint notion. ‘These gentlemen having independently and unknown to one another, conceived the very same ingenious theory to account for the appearance and perpetuation of varieties and specific forms on our planet, may both fairly claim the merit of being original thinkers in this important line of inquiry . . .’1

  Darwin had not sought – yet – to launch his theory. The letter from Wallace had bounced him into it. He was like an actor being pushed on to the stage before he had fully mastered his role. This would have strained nerves more robust than Darwin’s. It is no surprise that the year which followed the meeting at the Linnean Society was marked by tension and anxiety, and all the physical symptoms which made Darwin’s life so difficult. It was also, as it happened, a year marked by family illnesses and deaths. Darwin’s most famous book came to birth prematurely, and in an atmosphere of misery.