by Janet Browne
I will & must finish my Drosera M.S. which will take me a week, for at this present moment I care more about Drosera than the origin of all the species in the world. But I will not publish on Drosera till next year, for I am frightened & astounded at my results.… All this dreadful illness for last six months (& that wicked dear little Drosera) has made any progress in my larger book almost nothing.56
He brought the project to an end in February 1861 when he went to deliver some remarks on the subject at the Royal Society’s Philosophical Club, a dining club of scientific gentlemen that ate together an hour or two before Royal Society meetings.57 Faced with an intellectual cul-de-sac his attention was temporarily exhausted.
For most men this would perhaps have finished the matter. Yet Darwin’s hobby-horses never really came to a halt in so definite a manner. Every so often, for years afterwards, he would ask botanical friends about insectivorous plants and would beg unusual specimens from Kew to investigate. Eventually, in the 1870s, he was able to make a full study of meat-eating plants. Published in 1875, this was to be one of his most engaging books. “By Jove I sometimes think Drosera is a disguised animal!” he told Hooker.
VI
Even if he had not felt obliged to put sundews aside, other concerns began to crowd in. When he was in London for the Philosophical Club, he heard that Huxley’s wife was still very depressed over the death of their son despite the arrival of a new baby. Huxley asked Hooker and Darwin to stand godfather to the new baby, assuring them he would not care a fig if the words of the church service stuck in their throats. Huxley chose the name Leonard for the baby because, so the story goes, it contained within it the dead child’s name, Noel. Both Hooker and Darwin agreed to be godfathers, telling Huxley they would simply ignore the religious strictures. Leonard Huxley, who grew up an unconcerned atheist in the centre of this scientific circle, later became Hooker’s, Darwin’s, and Huxley’s biographer and edited several collections of letters.
Darwin was concerned about Henrietta Huxley. When he saw Huxley he suggested that she might like to visit Down House with the children for a rest in the country. “Do you not think a little change would be the best thing for Mrs. Huxley, if she could be induced to try it?” Down House was like a sanatorium already, he said, with his own Henrietta sickening upstairs. Mrs. Huxley (Nettie) would feel absolutely at home.
I have been talking with my wife & she joins heartily in asking whether Mrs. Huxley would not come here for a fortnight & bring all the children & nurse. But I must make it clear that this house is dreadfully dull & melancholy. My wife lives upstairs with my girl & she would see little of Mrs. Huxley, except at meal times, & my stomach is so habitually bad that I never spend the whole evening even with our nearest relations. If Mrs. Huxley could be induced to come, she must look at this house, just as if it were a country inn, to which she went for a change of air.58
Nettie Huxley had probably never received such a gloomy invitation before, but to everyone’s surprise she accepted. She wrote to Emma to warn her that she was rarely downstairs much before one o’clock, to which Emma replied that this was the usual state of affairs at Down House. She would only be following suit.
With their timetables so pragmatically agreed, the two wives spent the best part of March 1861 in each other’s company at Downe. Before then they hardly knew each other individually (Emma confessed that “it will be rather serious her coming without Mr H.”). The visit established the basis for a long-lasting family friendship. Emma and Nettie talked comfortably about their children and the usual childhood diseases, read books, and played music together. It may also have been a relief to realise that they were not alone in sharing their married lives with an intrusive third party like science. Best of all, they discovered a shared admiration for Tennyson. Emma had long despaired of Darwin’s dismissive attitude to Tennyson, and smiled to hear Mrs. Huxley’s frank declaration that Darwin had “no poet’s corner in his heart.” Henrietta Darwin enjoyed Tennyson too. So the women spent their evenings round the springtime fire, snugly wrapped in invalid shawls, reading aloud. They embraced the latest instalment of The Idylls of the King, Tennyson’s risqué account of Vivien’s seduction of Merlin. “Only fancy Mr. Darwin does not like poetry,” Nettie wrote in mock horror to her husband. “I fear he has not so good an opinion of you since I mentioned your taste for it. Let us pray for his conversion & glorify ourselves like true believers.”59
VII
In May, Henslow died. For Darwin it was like the death of a parent.
Henslow was aged only sixty-four (a year older than Lyell), and his death was unexpected, at least to his scientific acquaintances. A month beforehand, he had published an animated note in Macmillan’s Magazine correcting a misapprehension about his views on species and defending Darwin. He said he respected Darwin’s right to his opinion, but believed that evolution could never be proved. “God does not set the creation going like a clock, wound up to go by itself,” he told his brother-in-law Leonard Jenyns privately.60 For him to fail so suddenly was a great surprise. But there was time enough for Hooker and his wife, Frances (Henslow’s daughter), to travel from Kew to Ipswich to be at Henslow’s bedside; time enough for Jenyns to get over from Bath to say a fond farewell (Henslow was married to Jenyns’s sister); and time enough for frail and elderly Sedgwick, Henslow’s devoted old university colleague, to arrive by railway train from Cambridge, a long journey across country, to make his adieus. Sedgwick was moved to tears by the occasion and whispered words of faith into Henslow’s ear not knowing if they were heard.61 Hooker asked Darwin if he would come as well.
After an embarrassing misunderstanding in which Darwin thought Henslow was already dead, Darwin made his excuses and declined.
If Henslow … would really like to see me I would of course start at once. The thought had [at] once occurred to me to offer, & the sole reason why I did not was that the journey, with the agitation, would cause me probably to arrive utterly prostrated. I shd be certain to have severe vomiting afterwards, but that would not much signify, but I doubt whether I could stand the agitation at the time. I never felt my weakness a greater evil. I have just had a specimen, for I spoke a few minutes at Linnean Society on Thursday & though extra well, it brought on 23 hours vomiting. I suppose there is some Inn at which I could stay, for I shd not like to be in house (even if you could hold me) as my retching is apt to be extremely loud.62
He felt guilty for months afterwards. He had never before used illness in such an obvious way to avoid personal obligations. By rights, he should have made every conceivable effort to attend Henslow’s deathbed. Henslow had made him what he was, not only by giving him the chance of a lifetime with the invitation for the Beagle voyage, but also by his kindly attentions and support thereafter. The refusal was seemingly grounded in the same inner tightening Darwin had felt on his father’s death in 1849, not as intense as the despair occasioned by the children’s deaths, yet involving other disturbing feelings of emotional debts unpaid. Henslow’s demise ended another chapter in his life. Yet his absence was a poor return for Henslow’s friendship.
The excuse, moreover, put Darwin in an awkward position. Hooker knew he had been well enough to go to a Philosophical Club dinner in London; well enough for a speech at the Linnean Society; and well enough to entertain Mary Butler, his Ilkley water-cure friend, at home in April, with an evening of spirit-rapping and table-turning in the Down House drawing room. “She tried mesmerizing Franky,” Emma reported, “in which I think she would have succeeded but as he is such a nervous subject I did not much encourage it.”
But he was too sick for Henslow. Afterwards, full of remorse and wanting to compensate for his selfish behaviour, he tried to make amends in a brief account of Henslow’s influence on him that he wrote at Jenyns’s request for a memoir that Jenyns was preparing. Darwin’s recollections glowed with affection and respect. He dwelled on the qualities that he most admired in Henslow—modesty, sympathy, and self-effacement. Many years la
ter, it struck George Romanes that Darwin was actually describing himself, an “uncanny description,” said Romanes, of Darwin’s own virtues. The identification between pupil and teacher was indeed close. “Poor dear & honoured Henslow,” Darwin subsequently wrote to Hooker. “He truly is a model to keep always before one’s eyes.”
Guilt, death, ill health, and suffering haunted him. He was taking life much more badly than Emma had seen for some time, and she wondered if she was neglecting him because of her concern about Henrietta. She wished he could find some form of solace in religious belief. Around now, as she had done once or twice before, she wrote him a letter, choosing to write to him rather than to speak, in order to express herself carefully. She felt a letter was the best way to ensure his attention.
I cannot tell you the compassion I have felt for all your sufferings for these weeks past that you have had so many drawbacks. Nor the gratitude I have felt for the cheerful & affectionate looks you have given me when I know you have been miserably uncomfortable.
My heart has often been too full to speak or take any notice. I am sure you know I love you well enough to believe I mind your sufferings nearly as much as I should my own & I find the only relief to my own mind is to take it as from God’s hand, & to try to believe that all suffering & illness is meant to help us exalt our minds & to look forward with hope to a future state. When I see your patience, deep compassion for others, self command & above all gratitude for the smallest thing done to help you I cannot help longing that these precious feelings should be offered to heaven for the sake of your daily happiness. But I find it difficult enough in my own case. I often think of the words ‘Thou shalt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee.’ It is feeling & not reasoning that drives one to prayer. I feel presumptuous in writing thus to you.
I feel in my inmost heart your admirable qualities & feelings & all I would hope is that you might direct them upwards, as well as to one who values them above every thing in the world. I shall keep this by me till I feel cheerful & comfortable again about you, but it has passed through my mind often lately so I thought I would write it partly to relieve my own mind.
“God bless you,” wrote Darwin in the margin. She was asking him to do the impossible. Come what may he was the author of the Origin of Species.
VIII
Early in 1861, Murray asked Darwin for a third edition of his book, plainly confident that it would sell. This was published in April in a print run of two thousand copies, a fully revised edition. The title page indicated that this edition brought the total number of copies printed up to seven thousand. The most significant adjustments Darwin made were to include the historical sketch that he had attached to Bronn’s German translation and the authorised American edition of 1860. He added a notice of the forthcoming publication of Asa Gray’s pamphlet Natural Selection Not Inconsistent with Natural Theology.
Arranging publication of Gray’s pamphlet was one of Darwin’s more subtle moves. He had been impressed by Gray’s positive, thoughtful reviews of the Origin of Species in the Atlantic Monthly. Keen to spread the good news, Darwin arranged to have these reviews reprinted and distributed in Britain at his own expense, under the title Natural Selection Not Inconsistent with Natural Theology. A Free Examination of Darwin’s Treatise on the Origin of Species, and of Its American Reviewers (1861). He was a trifle peeved that Murray refused to accept this commission, saying it was hardly a commercial proposition; and instead Darwin got it printed by Trubner’s and distributed it personally from Down House, each copy of the pamphlet accompanied by one of his most beguiling letters. He asked Huxley and Hooker to get it mentioned in Natural History Review and the Gardeners’ Chronicle respectively. By reprinting and distributing a favourable review, Darwin was taking the process of persuasion a step further than he had attempted before, and he was pleased when it appeared to be successful. In years to come he was to make the same move several times again, a relatively unnoticed aspect of his propaganda campaign.
In this pamphlet Gray argued that evolution should not be dismissed as an atheistic horror story. He said that Darwin’s book ought to be given a fair hearing, free from the blasts of religious prejudice. He discussed the other reviews that had appeared in the United States and showed where their criticisms were answered by Darwin. All this was balm to Darwin’s ears. Although Darwin disagreed with Gray’s theological compromises—Gray suggested that God might create favourable variations and thereby still oversee the evolutionary process from a distance—he also believed that Gray showed that faith and natural selection were not mutually exclusive: “far the best theistic essay,” he said, he had ever read.63 Gray’s science was impeccable. His religious integrity was obvious. Darwin persuaded Gray to drop the customary anonymity and to allow his name to go on the pamphlet’s title page (“indispensable”). He went to a great deal of trouble to distribute the pamphlet to the people and journals he felt mattered most in Europe. And he felt particular satisfaction in sending presentation copies to Bishop Wilberforce and the Athenaeum—satisfaction and smug revenge.
As for the Origin of Species itself, Darwin’s financial account with Murray was healthy. The first edition brought him a payment of £180; the second, two instalments of £318 6s. 8d and £275 8s., which probably reflected his sudden notoriety and the increased print runs as much as anything. Murray’s payment for the third edition of 1861 was £372.64 Darwin felt he had done his best for Murray and did not produce another full-scale revision until 1866.
IX
All the while, apes were pushing noisily to the fore. Huxley and Owen’s increasingly accessible arguments made these creatures the topic of the day, a striking instance of the way that a particular species of animal can occasionally make manifest all the concerns of a human community unsettled by new ideas.65 Apes and monkeys (the general public were none too precise about the distinction) soon represented an exotic combination of all the issues involved in the evolutionary debate: fear, disgust, anatomy, theology, mankind’s created status, humour, morality, vulgarity, and sheer sensationalism.
Huxley did not have the debate all his own way. As chance would have it, the African explorer Paul Du Chaillu erupted onto the English lecture circuit early in 1861, full of stories about gorillas, a beast almost unknown to specialists and the public alike. Du Chaillu brought with him skins, skulls, and pickled specimens in barrels—the stuff of nightmares for some, horrified attention for others. He was a French-American who had grown up on the west coast of Africa, only twenty years old, and attractively unconventional, appearing on the London stage as a longhaired showman in buckskins; he was a charlatan whose reputation oscillated as wildly as the truth of his stories.66 On arriving in England he contacted Richard Owen, saying he wished to place his collection of gorilla specimens—the “Man Monkey” as the popular press had it—at the British Museum’s service.
Swiftly, Owen coopted Du Chaillu for his own purposes. These included the hope of silencing Huxley and ramming home the need for a national museum of natural history with himself at its head. Owen arranged for Du Chaillu to speak about gorillas at the Royal Geographical Society on 25 February 1861, one of the most spectacular meetings of the year, attended by cabinet ministers and their wives, as well as scientists and other interested parties.67 Taken aback by the pelts and skulls that Du Chaillu displayed on the platform, this elite audience turned the speaker into an overnight phenomenon. With Owen’s support, Du Chaillu went on to talk at the Royal Institution and the Ethnological Society, and his Explorations and Adventures was published later in the spring by John Murray. No doubt Du Chaillu found his relationship with Owen useful for publicity purposes, and he kept it warm with hints of more specimens to come. He hooked Owen for good by giving him a full-size male gorilla skin for the British Museum, complete with a scattering of bullet holes.
Du Chaillu’s colourful accounts were perfectly tailored to the stereotypes of his day. He claimed that gorillas were ferocious beasts, that they attac
ked without provocation, that their roars shook the woods. This news was apparently confirmed by Du Chaillu’s sketch of a gunman (himself) about to shoot a rampaging male animal. The scene shrieked with explicit Victorian imagery. Mankind versus nature; colonial conquest; civilisation versus the wild; humanity confronting the beast within: all these could be read into the picture, and were read. No amount of learned talk about the anatomy of brains could have framed the essence of the ape or angel question so vividly. It was popularly said that Darwin proposed that Victorian men and women, the presumed flowers of civilised society, were direct descendants of vile beasts like these. Huxley, Owen, Du Chaillu, evolution, monkeys, and gorillas tumbled together in respectable people’s minds.
The satirical journals picked up the conceit immediately. “Am I a Man and a Brother?” asked a gorilla in the May 1861 number of Punch.
Am I satyr or man?
Pray tell me who can,
And settle my place in the scale.
A man in ape’s shape,
An anthropoid ape,
Or monkey deprived of his tail?
Then Huxley and Owen,
With rivalry glowing,
With pen and ink rush to the scratch;
Tis brain versus brain,
Till one of them’s slain;
By Jove! it will be a good match!
On and on the Punch verses went. The anonymous author was Sir Phillip Egerton, a Tory M.P. with a fine collection of fossil fish but not much of a reputation for wit or poetry. Egerton was a trustee of the Royal College of Surgeons and the British Museum, and, in an institutional sense, he acted as Owen’s patron. When Huxley discovered who the author was, he squealed in triumph. For Egerton to defect from the Owenite camp and write such an amusing squib “speaks volumes for Owen’s perfect success in damning himself.”68
