Charles Darwin

by A. N. Wilson

  Darwin was not a public performer. Speeches and lectures before audiences were never easy for him. As it happened, the summer of 1858 was a time when it would have been all but impossible for him to leave Down in order to make a momentous public utterance in London.

  Building work had been in progress at Down House since September 1857. It was finished in June 1858, when, as Darwin wrote to William, his son at Rugby, ‘we entered two days ago into the new Dining Room, & it is charming’.2 The boy had sent him a cutting from The Times in which the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, son of the great Abolitionist, had denounced the Evil Trade. The hour of the great confrontation between Wilberforce and Darwin over matters of science lay two years in the future. Darwin on this occasion pronounced the bishop’s words to be ‘capital’.3

  Building works and bishops were less distracting than illness. The beginning of June found Darwin confined to a sofa with a boil.4 Scarlet fever was raging in the village – three children died of it. On 18 June, Etty, now fifteen years old, was struck down with a high fever and a violent sore throat – diagnosed by Emma as a ‘quinsy’. They feared it was diphtheria, a disease which appears to have come from France in 1858 and was sweeping England in an epidemic wave. ‘No actual choking but immense discharge & much pain & inability to speak & very weak and rapid pulse, with a fearful tongue’.5 The doctor who ‘damped us yesterday much’, eventually pronounced the attack to be mild, and Etty would recover. Her baby brother Charles Waring Darwin, however, not yet two years old, the youngest child, developed scarlet fever.

  As Darwin sat beside his little son, he was agonizing, in correspondence with Lyell, about the presentation to the Linnean Society. It was to have been on 1 June, but that meeting was cancelled as a mark of respect to a former President, Robert Brown, who died on 10 June. The momentous meeting was therefore rescheduled for 1 July, and in the days which led up to it Darwin was sitting in his house of sickness. His professional destiny was in the hands of Lyell. He could not doubt that Lyell’s solution, of presenting the outline of the theory to the Linnean Society at the same time as disclosing Wallace’s identical conclusions, was the right one. This, however, was not a time which was conducive to thought.

  Darwin’s namesake, his little son Charles Waring, was the last child in the line. Emma was nearly fifty. On 29 June, Darwin wrote to Hooker, ‘You will, & so will Mrs Hooker, be most sorry for us when you hear that poor Baby died yesterday evening. I hope to God he did not suffer so much as he appeared. He became quite suddenly worse. It was Scarlet fever. It was the most blessed relief to see his poor innocent little face resume its sweet expression in the sleep of death.’6

  He added, ‘Poor Emma behaved nobly & how she stood it all I cannot conceive. It was wonderful relief when she could let her feelings break forth.’7 By the same post, he sent to Hooker, now Assistant Director of the Botanical Gardens at Kew, his 1844 abstract. ‘I really cannot bear to look at it,’ Darwin confessed.

  Panic – Darwin’s own word8 – continued to grip Down as scarlet fever raged through the village. The Darwins made plans to get the children away as quickly as possible, but Etty, though recovering, was too weak to move – ‘she has not even put on her clothes’,9 he noted on 6 July.

  So it was that when the meeting took place at the Linnean Society in London on 1 July, the news of it was filtered to Darwin through a miasma of domestic pain – ‘death and severe illness & misery amongst my children’.10

  To the scientists who assembled at Burlington House – there were about thirty all told, including two foreign visitors – Wallace’s name, if known at all, was that of a commercial purveyor of specimens. Darwin had been elected one of their Fellows in May. Neither Darwin nor Wallace was present.

  The proceedings that afternoon began with fulsome praise of the lamented Robert Brown. Then the Secretary read the two papers, Darwin’s and Wallace’s. Hooker and Lyell were there; Wallace’s natural history agent, Samuel Stevens; two of Darwin’s friends, William Carpenter and William Fitton. After Darwin’s and Wallace’s papers had been read, the Fellows heard five other papers on zoological or botanical subjects before adjourning for tea. In his old age, Hooker looked back on the tea-drinking and claimed that Darwin’s theory was discussed with ‘bated breath’, while also thinking that ‘the subject was too novel and too ominous for the old school to enter the lists before armouring’.11 It was equally possible that they had listened with only half an ear, half convinced or half unconvinced. Of those present, Daniel Oliver and Arthur Henfrey became convinced evolutionists while Cuthbert Collingwood would remain sceptical.12

  When Thomas Bell, President of the Linnean Society, gave his Presidential Address in May 1859, he would opine: ‘The year which has passed has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear.’13

  Darwin’s chief priority, during that week when his theory was launched upon the scientific world, was to get the family away from the village. The number of children in the village who had died had risen to five.14 The baby Charles was not the only child in the house who appeared to have scarlet fever. Jane, the nursery maid (Parslow’s daughter), manifested some of the same symptoms – though she would recover.15 The Darwins planned to spend a few weeks on the Isle of Wight.

  By July they had established themselves at Shanklin. ‘This place has evidently sprung up, like a mushroom, & there are three hotels and many villas,’ he noted.16 The toll of family deaths, however, was not complete. Less than a month after the baby’s funeral, and just as they were beginning to enjoy the sea air, there came news that Darwin’s sister Marianne had died at the age of sixty. To their cousin Fox, Darwin wrote in a spirit of resignation: ‘A blessed relief after long continued & latterly very severe suffering’.17

  On the island, his health momentarily recovered. He went for long walks on his own. Hooker was trying to persuade him, by letter, that he should write an abstract of his theory for the journal of the Linnean Society. Darwin was reluctant at first. ‘How on earth I shall make anything of an abstract in 30 pages of Journal I know not.’ Yet, as he would add, ‘I am extremely glad I have begun in earnest on it.’18

  What he learnt on his long solitary walks on the Isle of Wight was that he had been waiting for this moment. His natural propensity to hesitate, to hold back from actions and decisions, had been keeping him silent for years – certainly since he had finished the first abstract of the theory in 1844.

  Two things were holding him back. One was dread of what the scientific world would make of the theory. The very fact that Darwin was so intensely ambitious – that he wanted to be cock of the walk in the world of Victorian science – made him afraid that his theory would fail to convince, on scientific grounds. For the rest of 1858, therefore, we see his correspondence bulging with scientific inquiries to colleagues. To Asa Gray, for example, at Harvard, we find Darwin asking not only botanical questions directly relevant to Gray’s own research, but also questions about the age of the earth and the different temperature of the earth after the glacial epoch.19 As we shall see, a decade later he would become deeply alarmed by the theories of William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) about the age of the planet, for the whole Darwinian theory of natural selection depended upon a geological time-span of hundreds of millions of years.

  This question of the age of the planet had been the first great breakthrough for the Victorian thinking classes, brought about by Lyell in 1830. The importance of Lyell, as we have seen, was that he made it impossible to believe that Archbishop Ussher’s dating of the Bible – placing the creation of the earth in 4004 BC – was sustainable. Chambers, in the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, had popularized Lyell’s ideas, and those of Lamarck. Darwin, as we have seen, was both appalled by Chambers’s book – which seemed to pip him to the post, in terms of enlightening the general public about the advances recently made in science – and aghast at the reli
gious controversy it had excited.

  Darwin believed that his own theory, like Lyell’s Geology, made it impossible to believe in the Bible. By now he had parted company with faith, but he was forever cautious about admitting it, either to his pious wife or to his public.

  After the holiday in the Isle of Wight, they returned to Down, and at his desk there Darwin began to write in an unstoppable flow. The thirty-page abstract which had been suggested as a suitable article for the journal of the Linnean Society was turning into a book – the book which would make his name. It would contain not a word about the origins of the human race, and not a word about the Bible. Behind its analyses of geology, botany and ornithology, however, shimmer all his preoccupations with these other subjects. The very fact that Darwin was too afraid to mention them overtly – in this book at least – was what made his pages so electrifying. Vestiges had, in its slapdash way, presented a compendium of the current state of scientific knowledge and, with journalistic genius, goaded its readers into paroxysms of doubt and anguish. One anonymous best-seller, Vestiges, had been followed by another, namely Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850), which, in mournful, perfectly musical lyrics, agonized about the ebbing of faith, and tried to clutch at it as it ebbed, ‘Believing where we cannot prove’.20

  On the Origin of Species, when it had been presented to the public, would be the doubt that did not dare to speak its name, and that was one of its best-selling ingredients. The generation immediately following the Victorians – their attitude typified by Lytton Strachey’s satirical Eminent Victorians – mocked their parents and grandparents for what seemed like hypocrisy, their double standards. Another way of viewing them was that they learnt to live with doubt. They were able to hold two ways of looking at the world in balance.

  Looking back from the perspective of 1873, Etty (by then Henrietta Emma Litchfield), a decided unbeliever, wrote to her brother George about ‘the evils of concealment about religion, & the cowardliness of much that is written upon scientific religion. But I don’t think, since one sentence in the Origin which I have groaned over in Spirit, Father has ever practised anything but what, I consider, the wise reticence of a man who does not care to give his opinions to the world upon a subject which he has not mastered.’

  It is hard to be certain what is the one sentence which made Etty groan, but it is presumably the point, in the second edition of Origin, where Darwin substituted the word ‘Creator’ for ‘Nature’, to play down the impersonality of the natural process he had spent the whole book depicting.

  Darwin had come to disbelieve in Christianity. No doubt family bereavements, and above all watching his children die, had confirmed his loss of faith, but it seems to have been one of those slow unravellings with no discernible single cause. Concealment, however, was a habit which came from the very core of his own nature; it came from his tenderness towards Emma, and his personal deviousness, his inability to come clean about religion as about other issues (such as his debts to previous scientists). Etty, when she edited a hundred years of Darwin family letters, remarked upon the fact that the ebbing and flowing of faith was not overtly discussed at Down House. Of Emma, Etty wrote, ‘As years went on her beliefs must have greatly changed, but she kept a sorrowful wish to believe more, and I know that it was an abiding sadness to her that her faith was less vivid than it had been in her youth.’ To Darwin, at about the time he was writing The Origin (the letter is undated, but Etty assigned it to this period), Emma wrote, ‘My heart has often been too full to speak,’ but she commended to him the text from Isaiah, ‘Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee.’21

  Just as it was Lyell who had organized the manner in which Darwin’s theory should be aired at the Linnean Society in the summer of 1858, so it was Lyell – when Darwin’s words began to flow from his pen so unstoppably – who arranged a publisher, his own, and the publisher of The Voyage of the Beagle, John Murray.

  Before he had direct dealings with him over the publication of The Origin, Darwin, with a mixture of dread and excitement at the hornet’s nest he was about to stir up, asked Lyell,

  Would you advise me to tell Murray that my Book is not more unorthodox, than the subject makes inevitable. That I do not discuss origin of man. – That I do not bring in any discussion about Genesis &c., & only give facts, & such conclusions from them, as seem to me fair. –

  Or had I better say nothing to Murray, & assume that he cannot object to this much unorthodoxy, which in fact is not much more than any Geological Treatise, which runs slap counter to Genesis.22

  Darwin wrote these words when the book was all but complete – 28 March 1859. This was after an intensive winter of writing. The ‘abstract’ had swollen to a substantial book. The work on ‘horrid species’ caused him intense nervous anxiety. The time of health and vigour on the Isle of Wight in the summer of 1858 had been short lived. The ‘old severe vomiting’ returned. By the time of his fiftieth birthday in February, he was drained of strength.

  He sent the book chapter by chapter for criticism by Hooker at Kew Gardens. This was not without its hazards. Hooker told Thomas Huxley,

  I proposed ending the week by finishing Darwin’s MS when to my consternation I find that my children have made away with upwards of ¼ of the MS. By some screaming accident, the whole bundle, which weighed over 1lb when it came (Darwin sent stamps for 2lbs) got transferred to a drawer where my wife keeps paper for the children to draw upon – & they have of course had a drawing fit ever since. – I feel brutified if not brutalized for poor D. is so bad that he could hardly get up steam to finish what he did – How I wish he could stamp and fume at me – instead of taking it so good-naturedly as he will.23

  The consolation for Darwin was that, very slowly, and after fourteen years of expressing doubts, Hooker had been converted to Darwin’s theory. Darwin clung to those who believed in him. Huxley would be the most vociferous, Hooker the most loyal, Lyell (when he came round to the theory with at least part of his mind) perhaps the most distinguished. For the most part, although Darwin’s book would persuade the thinking world what it had known or suspected since at least 1844 (and the publication of Vestiges), that evolution was true, he would have a harder job persuading the scientific academy that one species could evolve into another. In his lifetime, he never did so in Britain, though there were those abroad, as we shall see, especially in Germany, who became plus royaliste que le roi in their enthusiasm for the survival of the fittest.

  Lyell’s choice of Murray as the publisher was the perfect one. John Murray, as an observant low-churchman, remained loyal to the Creator, but as a good ‘tradesman’ – the word Lyell often loftily applied to this honest Scotch publisher24 – he could already hear, like the merry peal of church bells, the ringing of cash tills in the bookshops. His father had published Lord Byron and Jane Austen. The younger Murray had an interest in science.

  Once Lyell had acted as the go-between, Parslow, Darwin’s butler, was sent up to London with the completed manuscript of The Origin of Species wrapped in brown paper, to be left at Mr Murray’s offices in Albemarle Street: to the very house where an earlier John Murray, scandalized by their contents, had burnt Byron’s memoirs in the drawing-room grate.

  Murray sent the manuscript to two readers for their assessment. One of them was Whitwell Elwin. It was said that ‘No important decision could be arrived at in Albemarle Street without the advice and approval of the Rector of Booton,’25 a parish in rural Norfolk. (For Elwin was a clergyman. He was intensely conservative politically, and was indeed the editor of the Tory periodical the Quarterly Review, which Murray himself published. This was the journal which, under the editorship of Sir Walter Scott’s son-in-law, Lockhart, had so disgracefully savaged John Keats.)

  Although Elwin’s report on Darwin’s book has become the object of derision in most of the biographies, it does contain some telling criticisms. As is well known, the general assessment he made, and which he wished to communicate to Darwin himself
, was that the book was too diffuse and tried to cover too many areas of science and, in biology alone, too many species, too many examples. He suggested – and this is what provoked the guffaws of posterity – that Darwin should reframe the book and limit himself simply to the study of pigeons. ‘Every body is interested in pigeons. The book would be reviewed in every journal in the kingdom, & would soon be on every table.’26

  The core of Elwin’s objections to Darwin’s book, however, is that it does not prove the theory which it expounds. ‘At every page I was tantalised by the absence of proofs. All kinds of objections & possibilities rose up in the mind, & it was fretting to think that the author had a whole array of facts, & inferences from the facts, absolutely essential to the decision of the question which were not before the reader. It is to ask the jury for a verdict without putting witnesses in the box.’27 He also believed – and here Lyell endorsed his view – that, by contrast with The Voyage of the Beagle (‘one of the most charming books in the language’), The Origin was not only diffuse but dry. Darwin viewed Lyell’s and Elwin’s objections as ‘impracticable’. He told Murray, ‘I have done my best. Others might, I have no doubt, done [sic] the job better . . .’28

  George Frederick Pollock, who had acted as a publisher’s reader for John Murray’s father, was more positive than Elwin. Although Murray confided in Pollock that he considered the theory as absurd as contemplating a fruitful union between a poker and a rabbit, Pollock assured him the book would be much discussed. And he emphasized one of the book’s virtues: it concedes the ‘difficulties’ of the theory. He admired the way ‘Mr Darwin had so brilliantly surmounted the formidable obstacles which he was honest enough to put in his own path’.29