Erasmus Darwin identified the essential principles of natural selection, descent with modification, and other pillars of evolutionary thought. “The great globe itself, and all that it inhabit, appear to be in a perpetual state of mutation and improvement,” he noted in The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society in 1803.23 His evolutionary timescale was more realistic than that of his grandson Charles, and he was careful to emphasize that the study of evolution, rather than diminishing the power of God, served to glorify his work. “The world itself might have been generated, rather than created; that is, it might have been gradually produced from very small beginnings, increasing by the activity of its inherent principles, rather than by a sudden evolution of the whole by the Almighty fiat,” he wrote in 1794. “What a magnificent idea of the infinite power of THE GREAT ARCHITECT! THE CAUSE OF CAUSES! PARENT OF PARENTS! ENS ENTTUM! For if we may compare infinities, it would seem to require a greater infinity of power to cause the causes of effects, than to cause the effects themselves.”24
Erasmus Darwinism, however widely acclaimed at the time, has been obscured by a lingering confusion, perpetuated by both Charles Darwin and Samuel Butler, that equates the work of Erasmus Darwin with the errors of his follower Lamarck. A respected French naturalist and protégé of Buffon, Lamarck made lasting contributions to science, dividing the animal kingdom into vertebrates and invertebrates and assigning the label biology to the study of life. He is most famous, however, for his mistaken belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, the classic example being that giraffes grew taller by stretching their necks. Lamarckism reflected the prevailing views of the time and, indeed, was supported by Charles Darwin’s provisional hypothesis of pangenesis, published in 1868. The views of Erasmus were in some respects less Lamarckian, and closer to the modern synthesis, than those expressed much later by Charles. But Erasmus failed to develop a concise packaging for his argument. He either published his observations as lengthy footnotes to his unwieldy poems or concealed them within his Zoonomia, expanded to fourteen hundred pages in the third edition of 1801. Sixty years later, Charles Darwin would be justly proclaimed a prophet, but, as Butler argued in Evolution, Old and New, he had inherited—not invented—the evolutionary faith.
From an otherwise modest position as surgeon of Lichfield, fifteen miles north of Birmingham, Dr. Erasmus Darwin became one of the foremost physicians of his time. Refusing the king’s invitation to move to London, he kept up his daily rounds, dispensing his skills with uncommon generosity and moving as freely among all social circles as the bad state of the roads allowed. He lobbied prominently against the institution of slavery and for the humane treatment of the insane. Abstaining from both alcoholic spirits and Christianity, he embraced science and invention with an intellectual appetite exceeding his visible but less publicly celebrated appetites for female company and food. “Eat or be eaten,” he is said to have advised his patients, following his own prescription to the extent that his dining table was modified to accommodate his girth. “In his youth Dr. Darwin was fond of sacrificing to both Bacchus and Venus,” reported an anonymous contemporary, “but he soon discovered that he could not continue his devotions to both these deities without destroying his health and constitution. He therefore resolved to relinquish Bacchus, but his affection for Venus was retained to the last period of life.”25
Erasmus Darwin was a ringleader of the Industrial Revolution, helping to spark the evolution of machines as surely as some unknown Cambrian ancestor of ours ignited the diversification of metazoan life. As Charles’s son Francis Darwin (1848–1925) remarked, “Erasmus had a strong love of all kinds of mechanism, for which Charles Darwin had no taste.”26 In the 1760s, inspired by the Birmingham visits of Benjamin Franklin and drawing on his friendships with Matthew Boulton, Josiah Wedgwood, James Keir, William Small, and James Watt, Darwin founded the Lunar Society of Birmingham, an informal association of natural philosophers and industrialists whose meetings were scheduled to allow the full moon to assist its members home. The group of self-styled “Lunaticks” formed a nucleus for the industrialization of Britain, and either directly or via the interlocking relationships of the Lunar Society Erasmus Darwin had a hand in the origin of almost every species of mechanism explicit or implicit in the technologies of today.
Amid the peculiar triumphs and routine horrors of an eighteenth-century medical practice, Erasmus Darwin’s notebooks contain rough sketches for pumps, steam turbines, horizontal-axis windmills, canal lifts, speaking machines, internal combustion engines, a compressed-air-powered ornithopter, a hydrogen-oxygen rocket motor, and even an automatic water closet that flushes itself when one opens the door to leave. Driven to inspiration during his tedious rounds (“I, imprison’d in a post-chaise, am joggl’d, and jostl’d and bump’d, and bruised along the King’s highroad”),27 Darwin proposed several improvements to horse-drawn carriages, although a misadventure with one of his prototypes in 1768 left him lame for the remainder of his life. Anticipating Samuel Butler, he owned a horse named Doctor, and with steam power on the horizon, he was for a time obsessed with the vision of a steam-driven “fiery chariot” that would replace the horse. “As I was riding Home yesterday,” he wrote to Matthew Boulton, “I consid’d the Scheme of ye fiery Chariot—and ye longer I contemplated this favourite Idea, ye [more] practicable it appear’d to me.”
“I am quite mad of this Scheme,” Darwin continued, providing Boulton with a prospectus for a three-wheeled vehicle propelled by twin cylinders and an ingeniously differential rear-wheel drive. “By ye management of the steam cocks ye motion may be accelerated, retarded, destroy’d, revised, instantly & easyly. And if this answers in Practise as it does in theory, ye Machine can not fail of success.” Boulton, the original pioneer of mass production (from belt buckles to steam engines), was too far in debt to act on Darwin’s suggestion at the time, but the concept would resurface, like Darwinism, first in the age of railroads and then in the age of automobiles. A few years later, when James Watt developed the condenser engine, it was Darwin who promoted the Boulton & Watt partnership that brought the Industrial Revolution—and, soon enough, the “fiery chariot”—to life. Below Darwin’s signature was appended a prophetic postscript: “I think four wheels would be better—adieu.”28
Science fiction, as well as the automobile, owes Erasmus Darwin a founding credit. In a preface to the first (and anonymous) edition of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818), Percy Shelley acknowledged that “the event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence.”29 In her introduction to the 1831 edition, Mary Shelley, who wrote the novel at age nineteen, also acknowledged Darwin, noting, “I speak not of what the Doctor really did, or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of as having been done by him. . . . Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.”30
Darwin’s electrotherapy treatments, widely noted in Shelley’s time, still bring Dr. Frankenstein’s experiments to mind. “Two thick brass wires, about 2 ft long, communicate from each extremity of the [Galvanic] pillar to each temple. The temples must be moistened with brine,” wrote Darwin to the duchess of Devonshire in 1800. “The shock is so great as to make a flash in the eyes, and to be felt th[r]ough both the temples. . . . I have one patient here, a lady from near Scarborough, who has used it daily for giddyness with good success.”31 Darwin found that electric shocks could cure hepatic paralysis and renew the mobility of injured limbs. Luigi Galvani had shown the power of electric fluid to animate the legs of frogs; what additional powers might Darwin’s experiments unleash? A notice in the Birmingham Gazette on 23 October 1762 invited anyone “whom the Love of Science may induce” to visit Dr. Darwin’s laboratory: “The body of the Malefactor, who is order’d
to be executed at Lichfield on Monday the 25th instant, will be afterwards conveyed to the house of Dr. Darwin, who will begin a Course of Anatomical Lectures, at Four o’clock on Tuesday evening, and continue them every Day as long as the Body can be preserved.”32
“Dr. Darwin possesses perhaps a greater range of knowledge than any man in Europe,” remarked Samuel Coleridge, who coined the word Darwinising in reference to evolutionary speculations; in this as in most other Darwinisms, Erasmus preceded Charles.33 “The Darwinian theory of evolution is very much a family affair,” concluded Desmond King-Hele, “in which the shares of Erasmus and his grandson Charles are more nearly connected, and more nearly equal, than is usually supposed.”34 Whether Charles’s neglect of his grandfather’s work was a conscious or unconscious oversight has been diagnosed both ways. The first edition of Origin of Species makes no mention of Erasmus Darwin. “The history of error is quite unimportant,” explained Darwin to Huxley.35 In the third edition, of 1861, Darwin added a “brief, but imperfect” historical sketch, in which he commented in a footnote that “it is curious how largely my grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, anticipated the erroneous grounds of opinion, and the views of Lamarck.” This cast his grandfather in all but invisible type.
In 1879, Charles Darwin published, with a lengthy introduction, an English translation of Ernst Krause’s Life of Erasmus Darwin, just as Butler was about to publish his Evolution, Old and New.36 Instead of pacifying Butler, Darwin’s belated acknowledgment of his grandfather had the opposite effect. Butler discovered that Darwin’s translation of the original article by Krause, accompanied by “a guarantee for its accuracy” and presented as predating the appearance of Evolution, Old and New, contained several additional passages, including a final paragraph that Butler interpreted as a personal attack. “Erasmus Darwin’s system was in itself a most significant first step in the path of knowledge which his grandson has opened up for us,” suspiciously appended Krause, “but to wish to revive it at the present day, as has actually been seriously attempted, shows a weakness of thought and a mental anachronism which no one can envy.”37
The Darwin–Butler dispute arose from an alliance gone awry. The grandson of the surgeon of Lichfield and the grandson of the bishop of Lichfield had been launched on a collision path, burdened by illustrious ancestors and driven to claim new territory for themselves. In the cold climate of a Victorian childhood the Reverend Thomas Butler is remembered as particularly harsh. Butler’s alienation from his father and the church was followed by a disillusionment with Darwinism, which he denounced as early as January 1863 as “nothing new, but a rechaufée.”38 Charles Darwin had been a student of Butler’s grandfather and an acquaintance of Butler’s father, who noted that “he inoculated me with a taste for Botany which has stuck by me all my life.”39 Darwin would only reciprocate with a comment that “nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind than Dr. Butler’s school.”40
Darwin’s great treatise appeared in November 1859, but, recalled Butler, “being on my way to New Zealand when the Origin of Species appeared, I did not get it until 1860 or 1861.”41 The long sea voyage, the grand spectacle of the New Zealand wilderness, and a religious upbringing that sought to shift its convictions to a scientific faith rendered Butler keenly receptive to the theories presented in Darwin’s book. Reading Origin of Species by candlelight in a thatched-roof hut, the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere above, Butler’s imagination took flight beyond where Darwin left off. “Residing eighteen miles from the nearest human habitation, and three days’ journey on horseback from a bookseller’s shop, I became one of Mr. Darwin’s many enthusiastic admirers,” Butler recollected, “and wrote a philosophical dialogue (the most offensive form, except poetry and books of travel into supposed unknown countries, that even literature can assume) upon the Origin of Species.”42
This dialogue was printed anonymously in the Canterbury Press of 20 December 1862. By some means a copy reached Charles Darwin who, in forwarding it to an unknown editor in England, noted that “this Dialogue, written by some [one] quite unknown to Mr. Darwin, is remarkable from its spirit and from giving so clear and accurate a view of Mr. D[arwin]’s theory. It is also remarkable from being published in a colony exactly 12 years old, in which it might have [been] thought only material interests would have been regarded.”43
Butler’s dialogue aroused much discussion in the colony, and it was followed on 13 June 1863 by another installment, signed “Cellarius” and titled Darwin Among the Machines. In this essay Butler laid out the ideas that would be incorporated into Erewhon as the “Book of the Machines.” “We find ourselves almost awestruck at the vast development of the mechanical world, at the gigantic strides with which it has advanced in comparison with the slow progress of the animal and vegetable kingdom,” warned Butler. “We shall find it impossible to refrain from asking ourselves what the end of this mighty movement is to be. . . . The machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them; more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.”44
Butler’s essay did more than spoof a fashionable theory; it coupled a meticulous analysis of Darwin’s thesis to a keenly unencumbered view of the world as it stood in 1863. On his return to London, Butler produced another commentary, “The Mechanical Creation,” published in the (London) Reasoner, 1 July 1865. “Those who accept the Darwinian theory will not feel inclined to deny that whatever impulse the animal and vegetable kingdoms have sprung from, has been derived from within the natural influences which operate upon this world, and not from any extra natural source,” argued Butler. “They will believe that the changes and chances with which countless millions of years have been pregnant, have brought the existing organizations to their present condition without any specially creative effort of an overruling mind. What shall we think then? That the resources of nature are at an end, and that the animal phase is to be the last which life on this globe is to assume? or shall we conceive that we are living in the first faint dawning of a new one? Of a life which in another ten or twenty million years shall be to us as we to the vegetable? What has been may be again, and although we grant that hardly any mistake would be more puerile than to individualize and animalize the at present existing machines—or to endow them with human sympathies, yet we can see no a priori objection to the gradual development of a mechanical life, though that life shall be so different from ours that it is only by a severe discipline that we can think of it as life at all.”45
The relations between mind and mechanism have been argued since the time of Aristotle and Lucretius, the distinctions given a trademark presentation by René Descartes in his 1637 Discourse touching the method of using one’s reason rightly and of seeking scientific truth. Butler adopted an open-minded position that “the theory that living beings are conscious machines, can be fought as much and just as little as the theory that machines are unconscious living beings; everything that goes to prove either of these propositions goes just as well to prove the other also.”46 This was less radical a view than that suggested by Darwin’s colleague Thomas Huxley, who announced in 1870 that “we shall sooner or later arrive at a mechanical equivalent of consciousness, just as we have arrived at a mechanical equivalent of heat.”47
In Erewhon’s “Book of the Machines” the author of the anonymous manifesto presented within the anonymous book gives voice to these concerns: “Why may not there arise some new phase of mind which shall be as different from all present known phases as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables? It would be absurd to attempt to define such a mental state (or whatever it may be called), inasmuch as it must be something so foreign to man that his experience can give him no help towards conceiving its nature; but surely when we reflect upon the manifold phases of life and consciousness which have been evolved already, it would be rash to say that no others can be developed, and that
animal life is the end of all things. There was a time when fire was the end of all things; another when rocks and water were so. . . . There is no security . . . against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. . . . Either, a great deal of action that has been called purely mechanical and unconscious must be admitted to contain more elements of consciousness than has been allowed hitherto (and in this case germs of consciousness will be found in many actions of the higher machines)—or (assuming the theory of evolution but at the same time denying the consciousness of vegetable and crystalline action) the race of man has descended from things which had no consciousness at all. In this case there is no a priori improbability in the descent of conscious (and more than conscious) machines from those which now exist.”48
In May 1872, Butler sent a letter to Darwin apologizing “about a portion of the little book Erewhon which I have lately published, and which I am afraid has been a good deal misunderstood. I refer to the chapter upon Machines. . . . I am sincerely sorry that some of the critics should have thought that I was laughing at your theory, a thing which I never meant to do, and should be shocked at having done.”49 In reply, Darwin invited Butler to visit him at the Darwin estate at Down. Butler stayed with the Darwins for a weekend, a visit, wrote the Darwins’ houseguest, “of which I shall always retain a most agreeable recollection.”50 It was the memory of this visit, perhaps, that would prompt Darwin to write to Huxley eight years later that “the [Butler] affair has annoyed and pained me to a silly extent . . . until quite recently he expressed great friendship for me, and said he had learnt all he knew about evolution from my books.”51
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