I believe I am the only Englishman who has ever shot and skinned (and ate) birds of Paradise, and the first European who has done so alive, and at his own risk and expense: and I deserve to reap the reward, if any reward is ever to be reaped by the exploring collector … I am now, and have been a whole month, confined to the house, owing to inflammation and sores on the legs, produced by hosts of insect bites. Confinement has brought on an attack of fever, which I am now getting over. My insect collecting has suffered dreadfully by this loss of time.25
Though Darwin had suffered illness and discomfort on his own voyage of discovery as a young man, he expressed frank admiration of Wallace’s sticking power in his often solitary existence in remote regions full of dangers, from unseaworthy vessels to wild creatures, severe deprivation of food and water, and malarial fevers. The two men were not close acquaintances, but each knew the other’s published papers and they corresponded from time to time. While in Sarawak near the beginning of his eight-year sojourn Wallace wrote an article which, as he says in his autobiography, formed his first contribution to the question of the origin of species. He sent it to the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, where it appeared in September 1855. With characteristic scrupulousness and lack of egotism, Wallace adds in his memoir:
Its title was ‘On the Law which has regulated the Introduction of New Species’, which law was briefly stated (at the end) as follows: ‘Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely-allied species.’ This clearly pointed to some kind of evolution. It suggested the when and the where of its occurrence, and that it could only be through natural generation, as was also suggested in the ‘Vestiges’ [by Chambers]; but the how was still a secret only to be penetrated some years later.26
Darwin read and annotated Wallace’s 1855 paper, and, knowing that Wallace was on his travels, included him in a long list of colleagues working abroad in India, Antigua, Panama, Natal, the Cape of Good Hope, Hong Kong, The Gambia, Tunis, South America, Angola, and Jamaica from whom he requested ‘Pigeon and Poultry Skins’.27 He wrote to Wallace on 1 May 1857, acknowledging that from reading Wallace’s paper he could ‘plainly see that we have thought much alike & to a certain extent have come to similar conclusions’. He continued with a feeling remark: ‘I daresay that you will agree with me that it is very rare to find oneself agreeing pretty closely with any theoretical paper; for it is lamentable how each man draws his own different conclusions from the very same fact.’28
What Darwin has in mind here is the to him disappointing fact that even his best friend Hooker did not yet share his increasing certainty that natural selection was the mechanism (the how, in Wallace’s word) of evolution, let alone Lyell, who never quite accepted it. Nor did the doyen of British natural history Richard Owen, nor Darwin’s old teacher at Cambridge, the geology professor Adam Sedgwick (who on reading On the Origin of Species was aghast at the consequences for religious belief), nor, beyond these scientific great men, a multitude of readers of Darwin’s work when it was finally published for the general public. Here in his letter to Wallace he recognises a kindred spirit and expresses his gratitude. At the same time, we can perhaps detect some anxiety in Darwin that his theory, already fully worked out in his mind but not yet presented in its fullness to the world, might just have been ‘discovered’ independently by another. And that this other might well be the young scientific explorer with only a small amount of published work to his credit so far, Alfred Russel Wallace. For Darwin follows his remark allying himself with Wallace against the rest with a careful observation – one which he makes to a number of his correspondents at around this time – that he has been working on this particular question for a long time: ‘This summer will make the 20th year (!) since I opened my first note-book, on the question how & in what way do species & varieties differ from each other. I am now preparing my work for publication, but I find the subject so very large, that though I have written many chapters, I do not suppose I shall go to press for two years.’29 Wallace, having presumably received Darwin’s letter some time in August 1857, replied on 27 September, answering Darwin’s question about how long he intended to stay in the Malay Archipelago and expressing his pleasure at Darwin’s agreement with his paper, which is, he says, only a preliminary piece; he envisages having to spend much time on his return, doing research ‘in English libraries & collections’.30
Darwin replied on 22 December 1857, reassuring Wallace that his paper had not been ignored by the scientific community at home; ‘two very good men’, Lyell and Edward Blyth at Calcutta, had drawn Darwin’s attention to it. He hopes to read Wallace’s more recent notes on the distribution of animals in the Arru Islands, though he thinks Wallace is ‘inclined to go much further than I am in regard to the former connections of oceanic islands with continent’. As for his own work, he repeats that he has been at it for twenty years now, estimates that he has written about half his book, and confesses that he is getting on ‘very slowly, partly from ill-health, partly from being a very slow worker’. ‘I have now been three whole months on one chapter on Hybridism!’ Finally, he expresses his astonishment that Wallace expects to ‘remain out 3 or 4 years more’:
What a wonderful deal you will have seen: & what interesting areas, the grand Malay Archipelago & the richest parts of S. America! I infinitely admire & honour your zeal & courage in the good cause of Natural Science; & you have my very sincere & cordial good wishes for success of all kinds; & may all your theories succeed, except that on oceanic islands; on which subject I will do battle to the death.31
This letter is one of many, to Wallace and others, which show the combination in Darwin of openness, courteousness, generosity, modesty, and humour, married to an intellectual toughness, a strong sense of his own worth, and a not quite concealed determination to be credited with originality in his chosen field. He is transparent and apparently guileless, while expertly slipping in claims to precedence. These claims were helpful to him when he received Wallace’s next communication, a letter and short paper, now lost, written in February 1858 and arriving in Down in mid-June, which gave Darwin the fright of his life.
In the early days of June 1858 he was not yet ready to declare his findings beyond his close circle of scientific acquaintances. On 18 May he had written to Syms Covington, his erstwhile assistant and secretary, and before that his servant aboard the Beagle, telling his old friend, now living in Australia, about his work and plans and reiterating the remark about the length of time he had been researching his book:
My health has been very indifferent of late, owing to my working too hard. I have for some years been preparing a work for publication which I commenced 20 years ago, and for which I sometimes find extracts in your handwriting! This work will be my biggest; it treats on the origin of varieties of our domestic animals and plants, and on the origin of species in a state of nature. I have to discuss every branch of natural history, and the work is beyond my strength and tries me sorely.32
At this point Darwin still considered publication to be a few years away and expected to produce several volumes of his great work.33
His health, with distressing symptoms of vomiting and diarrhoea, had caused him, not for the first time, to seek a cure at one of the now fashionable hydropathic resorts. He told Covington that he had just got back from a ‘water-cure establishment, where I bathe thrice a day, and loiter about all day doing nothing, and for the time it does me wonderful good’. He had returned home on 4 May after spending two weeks at Dr Edward Lane’s establishment at Moor Park, in Surrey, a fine old house with extensive grounds. Darwin was much taken with the young doctor and his family, and admired Lane’s recent book Hydropathy: or the Natural System of Medical Treatment. An Explanatory Essay (1857).34 Less than six weeks after his return from Moor Park, he watched in sorrow as Lane attracted unwanted notoriety in newspaper reports from the Divorce Court.
Meanwhile, as the temperature in London and the surrounding area c
ontinued in the high 70s and low 80s °F (between 24 and 28 °C), Darwin worked on, telling Hooker on 8 June that he was ‘confined to sofa with Boil’, and was having to reply in pencil to Hooker’s note approving of a paper on genera which Darwin had sent him. ‘I had the firmest conviction that you would say all my M.S. was bosh’; ‘if you condemned that you w[oul]d condemn all – my life’s work – & that I confess made me a little low’. He hoped to write next on ‘the “principle of Divergence”, which with “Natural Selection” is the key-stone of my Book’.35
On Thursday, 10 June an event occurred which, along with the arrival a week later of Wallace’s letter and its enclosure, was to have an unexpected effect on Darwin’s plans. The 84-year-old Robert Brown, keeper of botany at the British Museum and former president of the Linnaean Society, the oldest biological society in the world, died. Hooker and Darwin were both members of the society, which was due to hold its last meeting of the year on 17 June, before the long summer break. Brown’s death meant that the meeting was postponed till 1 July so that a new committee member could be elected in Brown’s place. The delay made a difference to Darwin’s publication plans which he could not have foreseen.
Dickens dissolves his marriage
On that same Thursday, 10 June, Dickens’s public reading centred on the pathetic description of the death of little Paul Dombey, aged eight; it was to become a favourite of audiences everywhere. Dickens himself reported his great success the next day to his friend Daniel Maclise: ‘We had an amazing scene of weeping and cheering, at St Martin’s Hall, last night. I read the Life and Death of Little Dombey; and certainly I never saw a crowd so resolved into one creature before, or so stirred by any thing.’36
The Illustrated London News declared later in the summer that Dickens had ‘invented a new medium for amusing the English audience, and merits the gratitude of an intelligent public’; alongside the article is a sketch of a fraught-looking Dickens standing on the stage in St Martin’s Hall, clearly moved by his own prose.37 Dickens had put a huge effort into preparing for the first reading of the ‘Little Dombey’ passage on 10 June; he had extracted various pages from his novel Dombey and Son (1846–8), made additions and deletions, and had the resulting extract printed in large type with wide margins for his use.38 The reading lasted two hours, and covered Paul’s birth, painful episodes in his short life, his illness, and the death which takes up a whole chapter in the novel and dares to be insistently sentimental, with its repetition of the idea of waves overtaking the child under a streaming golden light and the narrator’s cry at the end.39
It was important to Dickens that this reading in particular should be welcomed by an adoring audience, for he had just made a significant move in the ongoing saga of his separation and the management (mismanagement, we might rather say) of the publicity which was inevitable in the case of such a public figure. He asked Delane, the editor of The Times, to carry a statement about his separation from Catherine; it appeared on Monday, 7 June, followed on Saturday, 12 June by publication of the same statement in Dickens’s own paper, Household Words, as well as in innumerable newspapers up and down the country. A great many people read and commented on the announcement. In particular there was much critical comment from a grateful, and in some cases gleeful, set of journalists writing for daily, weekly, and evening papers, fortnightly and monthly magazines, and – troublesomely for Dickens – the scurrilous penny papers which were making their appearance in large numbers in the years following the repeal of the last tax on newspapers in 1855.40
Dickens wrote as follows:
Three-and-twenty years have passed since I entered on my present relations with the public …
Through all that time I have tried to be as faithful to the public as they have been to me. It was my duty never to trifle with them or to deceive them …
My conspicuous position has often made me the subject of fabulous stories and unaccountable statements. Occasionally such things have chafed me, or even wounded me, but I have always accepted them as the shadows inseparable from the light of my notoriety and success …
For the first time in my life, and I believe for the last, I now deviate from the principle I have so long observed, by presenting myself in my own journal in my own private character, and entreating all my brethren … to lend their aid to the dissemination of my present words.
Some domestic trouble of mine of long standing, on which I will make no further remark than that it claims to be respected as being of a sacredly private nature, has lately been brought to an arrangement which involves no anger or ill-will of any kind …
By some means, arising out of wickedness, or out of folly, or out of inconceivable wild chance, or out of all three, this trouble has been made the occasion of misrepresentations, most grossly false, most monstrous, and most cruel – involving not only me, but innocent persons dear to my heart, and innocent persons of whom I have no knowledge, if, indeed, they have any existence – and so widely spread that I doubt if one reader in a thousand will peruse these lines by whom some touch of the breath of these slanders will not have passed like an unwholesome air.
Those who know me and my nature need no assurance under my hand that such calumnies are as irreconcileable [sic] with me as they are, in their frantic incoherence, with one another. But there is a great multitude who know me through my writings, and who do not know me otherwise; and I cannot bear that one of them should be left in doubt, or hazard of doubt, through my poorly shrinking from taking the unusual means to which I now resort of circulating the truth.
I most solemnly declare, then – and this I do, both in my own name and in my wife’s – that all the lately whispered rumours touching the trouble at which I have glanced are abominably false, and that whosever repeats one of them after this denial will lie as wilfully and as foully as it is possible for any false witness to lie before Heaven and earth.41
Unsurprisingly, Dickens had been advised against making this statement by his friends, especially Forster, who offered ‘strenuous resistance’ to the idea, though equally unsurprisingly the Times editor had encouraged him to go ahead.42 Dickens surely strikes the wrong note altogether in his feverish desire to put himself out of reach of the rumours – about both Ellen and Georgina, as he now knew, partly thanks to Thackeray – by appealing to his undoubtedly large public. He cannot avoid seeming boastful when he writes of the ‘faith’ of his readers – his ‘brethren’ – over many years. He contradicts himself by claiming at once that he is a public man and yet that his private life is no one else’s business, then compounds the contradiction by voluntarily referring to that private life, thus making it everyone’s business. By alluding to ‘grossly false’, ‘monstrous’, and ‘cruel’ slanders while not saying directly what they are, and by talking mysteriously of ‘innocent persons’, some known to him and others perhaps imagined (who? and by whom?), he invites the interested but not initiated reader – in other words everyone outside the small circle of his friends and family and London’s journalists and clubmen – to ask what the terrible slanders are and who the innocent persons could be. He insists most vehemently on his truthfulness just where he is being most untruthful, but no doubt he speaks truly when he says he ‘cannot bear’ for even one of his readers or admirers to think badly of him.
Dickens himself had given good advice to the artist William Holman Hunt only two months earlier. Hunt had written to complain of a story printed in Household Words in April which he asserted was a disgraceful libel on himself, since it concerned an artist (unnamed, but clearly meant to represent Hunt) who is suspected of having a sexual liaison with his model. Dickens replied, expressing his astonishment that Hunt should think the artist in the story (by Robert Brough) was a portrait of him and urging Hunt not to insist on Dickens inserting an assurance in the paper that Hunt was not the original. Employing the logic he was subsequently unable to bring to his own case, he told Hunt on 20 April that he had ‘not a doubt’ that such an insertion ‘would suggest t
o the public what they have not the faintest idea of, and that its effect would be exactly the reverse of your desire’.43 Wise words. Dickens, the all-powerful editor of Household Words, had the last word in the case of Hunt; he saved him embarrassment by not including an explanation.
Many of the newspapers that carried Dickens’s statement in the days after 7 June simply printed it, as did The Times, without comment. Some, like the St James’s Chronicle, expressed sympathy with him. ‘We welcome his authoritative and touching denial’, it said on 8 June, which ‘will be accepted as a sufficient vindication of the honour of his untarnished name.’44 The Era, though declaring its warmth towards Dickens, expresses the very opinion Dickens had offered Hunt, saying that it was a mistake for him to bring his private business before the public. At the same time it indicates that, as a metropolitan newspaper with its finger on the pulse, it knows about the stories in circulation, for good measure making it clear that it dislikes his assumption of his own supreme importance in the world:
In our judgment, the scandal was not so widely spread as Mr Dickens has been led to believe. Not one in a hundred of those who admire his works have ever heard of the reports in question. They have been confined mainly to the literary world in which Mr Dickens lives, and therefore have appeared to him to be more general than they were … Unfortunately, Mr Dickens has fallen into the common error of little minds, in thinking that he is of much more consequence in the world than he really is, and that his whereabouts, his social and domestic proceedings, are events in which the public feels an absorbing interest.45
One Hot Summer Page 12
