by Janet Browne
Mivart wanted none of this. All through 1869 he published renegade evolutionary articles in the Catholic periodical the Month on “difficulties of the theory of natural selection,” maintaining that Darwin’s ideas could not explain the whole of nature. He dwelled on awkward anatomical cases such as the close resemblance between Australian marsupial “wolves” and European wolves, or the similarities between the eyes of cephalopods and vertebrates. It was hard to explain these similarities as coincidence. “To have been brought about in two independent instances by merely indefinite and minute accidental variations, is an improbability which amounts practically to impossibility,” Mivart stated. Like Asa Gray he opted for theological compromise, arguing that there must be some higher guidance in the process of variation that provided an element of design or direction in the evolutionary process. Underneath ran scarcely veiled contempt for the inflexible position of the Darwinians.
Darwin liked Mivart when first introduced to him and welcomed the young man’s obvious ability as a natural scientist. He felt bewildered, and then betrayed, by these critical articles, for it seemed to him that Mivart deliberately ignored anatomical points when they did not suit, and that he twisted Darwin’s words solely to make the older man look foolish. With sinking spirits, Darwin wondered if Mivart might become another thorn in his side, another Owen. Intemperately, he let his feelings show. He accused Mivart (behind his back) of too much Catholicism, of being overly clever with words as if he were a Jesuit priest in training. When Mivart pointed out the unlikelihood of any intermediate steps in evolution, Darwin snapped back, “If a few fish were extinct, who on earth would have ventured even to conjecture that lungs had originated in a swim-bladder?”12 From time to time, Mivart wrote conciliatory letters to Darwin stating the high regard he felt for the Origin of Species. Darwin regarded the letters as two-faced.
When Mivart pulled his articles together in 1870 for a book called The Genesis of Species, published just before Darwin’s Descent of Man, Darwin felt the facts were being distorted for religious benefit. He covered his copy with bitter remarks. “I utterly deny,” “What does this mean,” “You cd. not make a greyhound & pug, pouter or fantail thus—it is selection & survival of the fittest.” The last straw came when Mivart claimed in print that Darwin had shifted his ground on blending inheritance in the previous edition of the Origin of Species merely in order not to lose face. “Not fair,” Darwin moaned in the margin.13
He found it astonishing that Mivart could still write letters to him. Blindly crashing onwards, Mivart rashly explained, “My first object was to show that the Darwinian theory is untenable, and that natural selection is not the origin of species,” a point of view that was unlikely to improve relations.14 Exasperated, Darwin confided in Wallace.
You will think me a bigot when I say, after studying Mivart, I was never before in my life so convinced of the general (ie. not in detail) truth of the views in the Origin.… I complained to Mivart that in two cases he quotes only the commencement of sentences by me, and thus modifies my meaning; but I never supposed he would have omitted words. There are other cases of what I consider unfair treatment. I conclude with sorrow that though he means to be honourable, he is so bigoted that he cannot act fairly.15
Irritated by Mivart’s defection, Darwin then came to dislike him. Catholicism was a convenient enemy here, representing to Darwin every outmoded tradition, superstition, and ritual that he felt should be forcibly expelled from modern life. While perfectly prepared to tolerate the low-key formulae of the Church of England, and an admirer of the social values of several of the clergymen he came across, such as Henslow, Innes, and Kingsley, he easily reverted to the unthinking anti-Catholic prejudice of the English middle classes. Nearly everyone Darwin knew regarded Roman Catholicism with distaste or horror. His friends and family could sympathise with him about Mivart’s supposedly outrageous Jesuit tricks. In his mind’s eye he saw Mivart opposing him not with the arguments of science but with bells and incense.
Faced with Darwin’s disapproval, Mivart tried to retain some dignity.
I herewith close this correspondence & will say nothing even in this letter calculated to annoy you in the least. I am exceedingly sorry to have caused you mortification & I protest, in spite of all you may think, I have, do and shall feel more than “friendly” towards you.16
For a moment Darwin seemed to be losing his grip. He lost patience with Frances Power Cobbe as well when their paths briefly crossed in Wales during that same summer of 1869. The Darwins and London Wedgwoods went as a family party to stay in Caerdeon in the Barmouth estuary. On the way home after this holiday, Darwin went to Shrewsbury for a last look at the old house and gardens, an occasion he experienced with relative equanimity. At Caerdeon he felt miserable. Hampered by a bad leg, he could scarcely get out on the hills or enjoy the clear Welsh air. “I have been as yet in a very poor way; it seems as soon as the stimulus of mental work stops, my whole strength gives way. As yet I have hardly crawled half a mile from the house, and then have felt fearfully fatigued. It is enough to make one wish oneself quiet in a comfortable tomb.”17
It was on one of those half-mile crawls that Darwin encountered Miss Cobbe. He was peacefully alone on a hillside when he was spotted. Without any preliminaries, Cobbe bellowed at him over the turf a question about John Stuart Mill’s theories on inherited instincts. Startled, but polite, Darwin began a recondite discussion about Mill at the top of his voice, stopping short in embarrassment when a friend came by. Cobbe laughed about “words flying in the air which assuredly those valleys and rocks never heard before” and dubbed the track the “Philosopher’s Path.”18 Unnerved, Darwin chose his walks more carefully in future. Privately he asked William to read up on Mill and tell him what to think.
Cobbe soon afterwards offended him by publishing extracts from one of his letters in the Echo, the campaigning newspaper with which she was associated.19 Darwin had written to Cobbe telling her about his interest in a particular case of miscarried justice in the Bromley region, and mentioning that he had also written a letter in his capacity as a local magistrate to the home secretary (Henry Bruce, Lord Aberdare). Clever editing made him look as if he were publicly criticising the Kent magistrates and offering to set up a subscription fund to “ensure even-handed justice,” a situation he hotly denied. Darwin never trusted her again. This odd pair were afterwards permanently estranged over the antivivisection movement when Cobbe attacked Darwin’s defence of the use of animals in scientific experiments. After Darwin’s death, Emma felt obliged to refuse Cobbe permission to reprint the magistrates’ correspondence in her Autobiography. She published it anyway.20
If Mivart and Cobbe were not enough, there was Wallace still claiming that natural selection did not apply to humans, urging his scientific friends to attend séances, devotedly chasing the spirit world with photographs, heat detectors, and electric recording devices. “I must add that I have just re-read yr article in the Anthropol. Rev. & I defy you to upset yr own doctrine,” Darwin groaned.21
He felt the pressure of alternative stories mounting. The Duke of Argyll’s creative evolutionism was gaining ground. Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Biology and his Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative integrated evolutionary concepts with political, social, and religious ideas already attractive to contemporaries. Galton’s critiques of pangenesis were published. Between 1869 and 1870, Darwin’s work was reviewed in fifty-two significant journals, some 15 percent of all the reviews he received in his lifetime,22 and scores of other evolutionary books and pamphlets had been published in the twelve years since the Origin had first been issued. Mudie’s Circulating Library made a point of distributing many of these, indirectly making it possible for even the most geographically isolated readers to have an opportunity to acquaint themselves with issues of the day.23
There was a lot for Darwin to keep in mind, a lot to reformulate and squeeze into shape. Above all, there was the endless problem of propriety. In his �
��Man book” he was tackling Adam and Eve directly. For twelve years, Victorians had debated whether natural selection could—or should—explain human origins. Many reviewers thought that such matters were not a legitimate area of study. The dawn of humanity was a matter for theologians, they said, not for naturalists. In order to counter this view, Darwin needed to demonstrate beyond doubt that humans were as much a part of nature as any animal.
He began to feel sick with effort and worry. “Pins and needles” kept him from working, he explained to Henry Bence Jones. “Everything has been of late at a stand still with me, for I have not had strength to do hardly anything,” he told Hooker. “With respect to my own book, the subject grows so, that I really cannot say when I shall go to press.”24 Perhaps out of desperation, he bought cigars in 1870 as well as snuff and cigarettes, paying nearly £5 to his London tobacconist.25
Still, he felt it was time to be frank. “Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamps of his lowly origin,” he wrote in his “Man” manuscript.
The early progenitors of Man were no doubt once covered with hair, both sexes having beards; their ears were pointed and capable of movement; and their bodies were provided with a tail, having the proper muscles.… The foot, judging from the condition of the great toe in the foetus, was then prehensile; and our progenitors, no doubt, were arboreal in their habits, frequenting some warm, forest-clad spot. The males were provided with great canine teeth, which served them as formidable weapons.26
IV
While he wrote and worried, his younger children were making their separate ways. Francis (Frank) had followed George to Trinity College Cambridge, first reading mathematics and then turning to natural sciences and graduating in this subject in 1870. The natural science tripos, dating from 1851, had been reformulated in 1861, and it was to be completely restructured in 1871 in tandem with the opening of laboratory and museum facilities, an indication of the gathering pace of high Victorian scientific concerns.27 At Cambridge, Francis made friends with a number of young evolutionists and physiologists who admired his father’s work. After his degree he came into contact with Michael Foster, the charismatic new lecturer in physiology, and turned to medicine. He went to St. George’s Medical School in London, taking an M.B. in 1875, but never practised as a doctor.
Next in the family, Leonard had joined the army straight from school and went to Woolwich Military Academy to train as a military engineer. He interested himself particularly in photography and became a useful member of surveying expeditions. Horace, the youngest, whose schooling was constantly interrupted by illness, had gone to a private tutor before entering Trinity like his brothers. He began in 1868 but did not take up his place immediately because of ill health and spent six years acquiring a degree rather than the customary four, graduating in 1874. Leonard’s and Horace’s entries into these institutions was poignant. Leonard chose the army because he thought himself the stupidest of the children, at one point inquiring of Darwin if a man could hope to develop into a genius after the age of twenty.28 Horace similarly underestimated himself by thinking he was good only for mechanical occupations. Darwin wrote to Horace’s university tutors to say how physically frail the boy was and how cautiously his education must procede. Their father’s doubtful attitude probably did little to encourage confidence. “I have been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things,” Darwin told Horace in 1871, after he passed his first examination at Cambridge. “Many men who are very clever—much cleverer than the discoverers—never originate anything.”29
Darwin’s second daughter, Elizabeth (Bessy), was rather more of a silent entity. She had been an unusual child, given to what Darwin referred to as strange “shivers & makes as many extraordinary grimaces as ever.” Her speech was sometimes confused, according to Emma, and her pronunciation peculiar, although the letters she wrote from school and during visits abroad show little sign of this. “She was not good at practical things,” said a member of the following generation who was very fond of her, “and she could not have managed her own life without a little help and direction now and then.”30 In her early twenties at this point, she looked likely to remain at home with her parents.
In any case, the children interested and pleased Darwin. “When all or most of you are at home (as, thank Heavens, happens pretty frequently) no party can be, according to my taste, more agreeable, and I wish for no other society,” he was to write in his Autobiography.31 The feeling was evidently reciprocated. When the boys came to visit in large sociable parties, accompanied by university friends, with dances, horses, billiards, and bicycle excursions on their united minds, they brought welcome noise and dash to the old house.
Nevertheless, they discovered Darwin’s growing fame could be an imposition at times. George, Francis, and Horace mixed with a number of university people who were coming to base their professional trajectories on Darwin’s theories. They learned to bow graciously to the pressures of celebrity life at one remove and must sometimes have wondered whether they received social invitations because they were called Darwin, never quite certain if they could make a career on their own, often speculating that colleagues were fishing for an invitation to dine at Down House. Their father’s writings shadowed every conversation. Francis met the Origin of Species in his university curriculum, for example, as a practical result of Alfred Newton’s and Henry Fawcett’s enthusiasm for evolution by natural selection. In the natural science tripos examination in 1871, the year after Francis graduated, Newton asked biology candidates: “What are the objections to the Cuvierian subdivisions of the class Aves? What progress has been made towards a more natural and satisfactory arrangement of the class?” The best answers would include some discussion of Darwin’s proposals. Fawcett was explicit (and rather more testing) in the moral sciences exam: “How do you consider that the leading principles of the Darwinian theory stand in relation to the doctrine of Final Causes?”32
At Down House, these younger members of the family were obliged to share their Sunday lunch with Darwin’s followers. Visitors were sometimes an unintentional source of amusement. Henrietta always found Ernst Haeckel’s eccentric turn of phrase funny, especially the time when he commended London banquets with the words “I like a good bit of flesh at a restoration.” Emma regarded the guests with a mix of resignation and good humour. “Today we had a thorough Yankee,” she remarked in 1871. “He is a sort of jackal of Appleton the publisher, and so amusing we all had great difficulty in avoiding laughing, and did not dare look at each other.” At other times, visitors were an encumbrance. Each son and daughter appeared to accept Darwin’s theories unquestioningly and was able to contribute to the conversation. Even Emma, who may never have really accepted his views although managing to live with them comfortably enough, was a willing and polite hostess to dedicated evolutionists. As is often the case with the families of the famous, his wife and children became swallowed up in his renown. Deep down, Darwin’s sons and daughters were forced to accept that he was not just their father. He belonged to everybody.
Up to a point, Darwin’s children were hardly conscious of the consequences of their involvement until they began making their own progress in life. They were, of course, used to assisting Darwin in any number of minor tasks at home. As they became adult, however, Darwin’s growing fame transformed what would otherwise be small family chores into useful contributions of which each could be proud. Gradually Darwin drew them into his tactics for the public dissemination of his views.
When George took Bessy to Paris to meet a gang of Wedgwoods for a holiday in 1869, for example, Darwin asked him to make social calls on some of his evolutionary correspondents. Of these, Jean Louis Quatrefages was by far the most helpful to him, although never accepting Darwin’s doctrines.33 “Vous êtes incontestablement le chef de toutes les théories transformistes,” he wrote to Darwin in 1869. “J’ai été heureux d’exprimer, publiquement tout l’estime que je porte en vous à l’homme et un s
avant.” Darwin was keen that his French friends should understand the depth of his gratitude. Obediently George sent up his card to Quatrefages (“a tall good looking man with grey whiskers & a kind of beard”), who paid him so much attention that George began to think that “it must have been me after all who wrote the Origin.”34
Then in May 1870, when Darwin and Emma visited Cambridge to see Francis in his final year as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Darwin discovered that he could mingle easily with the young naturalists of the future. He and Emma stayed in the Bull Hotel, admired the spring greenery along the Backs, and lunched in Francis’s college rooms. Darwin paid a scientific call on the Cambridge ornithologist Alfred Newton, who had adopted Darwinian theory, and he made sure to talk with the embryologist Frank Balfour, brother of Arthur Balfour, the future prime minister, and already a noted experimentalist. Francis afterwards invited Frank Balfour to Down House for a weekend visit, and Darwin liked him enormously. “A young Mr. Balfour, a friend of my son’s, is staying here,” he wrote to Galton later that year. “He is very clever & full of zeal for Nat. Hist.—He has been transplanting bits of skin between brown & white Rats, in relation to Pangenesis!”35 Darwin warmed to him as a friend of his son’s and as a good biologist. Family feeling was easily translated into scientific respect and vice versa.
