The main Dissenters in the village were a group of around thirty who met in a small chapel on the lane between the village and Down House. Their minister, James Carter, was a painter and glazier from Wiltshire who had married in the 1820s and settled down with his wife in Tooting, “in a religion of their own making.” This phrase reflected the freethinking of the times. It could have been used of William Blake as he lived quietly in London with his personal prophecies, or of Charles in Downe for that matter, with his own private thinking about the sources of our moral sense. Mr. Carter had become an itinerant preacher and had been invited to Downe in 1836 to form a little church “upon New Testament principles, with the exception of believers’ baptism.” He lived in a cottage near the chapel and came to Down House whenever there was woodwork to be painted or a broken window to be repaired. According to his daughter Marianne, he was a man “of most tender conscience,” and lived a troubled life. While at Downe, he had “much to try his faith; many battles to fight; many enemies to encounter; trials from within, trials from the world, trials through the duplicity of professed friends; Satan often permitted to set in upon his soul with all his fiery darts; and unbelief would so cloud his mind, that he was sometimes led to question whether he knew anything for himself after all.”
In June 1851, Mr. Carter and his congregation reformed themselves on Strict Baptist principles as the Church of Christ assembling at Downe Chapel. They set out their beliefs in a “declaration” which went far beyond Mr. Innes’s fierce claims about human nature and destiny. “All mankind in their own nature are totally carnal and unclean, utterly averse to all that is good, being not only enemies, but enmity itself against the Blessed God and all goodness, and utterly incapable of performing one spiritual act, being dead in trespasses and sins.” The group believed that before the world was made, “Jehovah did elect a vast but certain and definite number of the human race unto eternal salvation.” By contrast with Emma, they placed no value on their own responsibility for their actions, declaring that their regeneration, conversion, and sanctification “never was, and never can be, the act of man’s free will and humane ability, but they are in all cases the effect of the mighty efficacious and invincible Grace of God.” The Darwins’ gardener, Henry Lettington, who helped Charles with many of his plant experiments in later years, was a deacon of the chapel.
The other main challenge to Mr. Innes’s influence among his parishioners was the village school for boys which Sir John Lubbock provided and maintained, and the Darwins supported by paying the fees of a few needy children. At the time, parish schools were a battle-ground in the struggle between “church” and “secular” approaches to education and improvement for poor people. The clergy managed the schools wherever they could, and often insisted on church attendance in order to draw pupils and their parents back from Dissent. Progressive Whigs like the Lubbocks and Darwins wanted the schools to help poor people to acquire “useful knowledge” and improve themselves. They saw religion as a hindrance rather than a help because it led to doctrinal arguments and sectarian feeling. Sir John had set up his school on the “undenominational model” of the British and Foreign School Society which forbade religion in the classroom. An inspector of schools for the Archbishop of Canterbury who visited the school in 1851 found that Mr. Mumford the schoolmaster had succeeded in making his pupils work “vigorously and cheerfully.” The discipline was good, but the general bearing of the boys was “far from pleasant.” “The general knowledge is superficial, though extended. More quickness than real intelligence is shewn in their answers.” Noting that “no religious instruction whatever is permitted,” the inspector commented with alarm that “the ignorance of scripture in the second and third classes is heathenish.”
While Emma brought up the children in her faith, Charles thought carefully about his own beliefs, and his doubts grew. There was a history in Britain of questioning the grounds of faith and the witness of the Gospels. In the previous century, David Hume had argued in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that there were logical difficulties in accepting the New Testament as evidence of Christ’s miracles, and Edward Gibbon had treated early Christian history with corrosive scepticism in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The German “Higher Criticism” raised more questions and, by the 1840s, anyone disposed to doubt could choose between a number of approaches.
During Annie’s childhood, Charles looked at a number of books which dealt with the so-called “evidences” of the Christian Revelation, especially Christ’s miracles. In 1845, he read the Unitarian James Martineau’s Rationale of Religious Enquiry, which explored the ways in which reason could be used to support faith in Christ. Charles came to feel that “the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported.” He was, though, as he said later in his Autobiography, “very unwilling to give up my belief.” He had “daydreams of old letters between distinguished Romans and manuscripts being discovered at Pompeii or elsewhere which confirmed in the most striking manner all that was written in the Gospels.” His dreams may have been prompted by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Last Days of Pompeii, which he read in 1847. Lytton had introduced a secret Christian group into his story of the catastrophe which overwhelmed the Roman city in a.d. 79; many of his readers would have known that the greater part of the city still lay buried beneath the debris of the eruption, and the possibility of finding documents that somehow confirmed the Gospel narratives must have seemed real.
In spring 1848, Charles and Emma read The Evidences of the Genuineness of the Gospels by Andrews Norton, an influential Unitarian theologian at Harvard University. Norton recognised that the Gospel texts were probably corrupt in places, but aimed to prove that they had been composed by the Apostles, and that the surviving texts preserved their essential content. Emma made notes in her interleaved Bible about a number of passages that Norton suggested were not original. His comments may have helped her over some difficulties, and they may have brought her to the same point of view as her Aunt Jessie, who wrote that she found in the Bible “all my heart wants, without believing that every word is inspired . . . What puzzles me too much, or appears contradictory, I lay to the faults of the many hands through which it reaches me, and still clasp it to my heart as a divine book, however it may have been perverted by the perverse.”
Charles judged Norton’s book “good” but, as he dwelt on the question of proof of the Gospel narratives, he found it more and more difficult, even giving free rein to his imagination, “to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me.” It is important to recognise how fundamental his doubts had become. He was not concerned about what particular evidence there happened to be of Christ’s miracles, but whether one could envisage any historical evidence that could ever prove that a truly miraculous occurrence had taken place. This was David Hume’s notorious philosophical doubt about the grounds for belief in any supernatural happening.
Charles’s brother Erasmus, together with Hensleigh and Fanny Wedgwood, knew many people in London whose Christian faith was evolving into forms of theism and humanism that shocked orthodox believers. Books were appearing about faith and doubt, and the Darwins and Wedgwoods often discussed them with their friends. In the summer of 1848, Charles read a memoir of John Sterling, who had been an undergraduate at Cambridge two years before him. Energetic and impetuous, Sterling had wanted to become a priest but could not because of ill-health. He had doubts about the Old Testament; he discovered the German Higher Criticism and came to question his whole Anglican faith. Facing a wasting death from tuberculosis, he rejected the complacency of Paley’s natural theology. “I do not pretend to believe that in a system of things full of corruption and curses, all is for the best . . . Paley’s saying ‘It is a happy world after all,’ which some might attribute to the goodness of his heart, seems to me one of the most cruelly heartless of all human utterances.” Sterling eventually found the faith he yearned for in his own
feelings, rather than in the authority of Scripture.
In November 1848, Charles’s father died an “unbeliever,” and Charles and Erasmus faced the question whether he would be eternally punished for his rejection of Christ’s message of salvation, as Scripture suggested. Erasmus was confident that God had been kind to their father in death, writing to Fanny Wedgwood that he could not “feel anything but how good God was to take him without suffering more.” He does not seem to have been concerned that his father might be doomed to eternal punishment for rejecting the Christian message, and there is no indication that Charles was worried either.
Early the next year, Charles continued with his sceptical reading. Erasmus and Fanny’s friend Harriet Martineau wrote about a journey to the Holy Land in Eastern Life, Present and Past. She had started her writing career as a Unitarian but in the 1840s grew increasingly doubtful of revealed religion and moved through a theist phase to an atheistic humanism. In Eastern Life she tried to show the genealogy of the Christian faith in the Egyptian and Judaic religions, and pointed towards the purely human ideals which she saw as the final aim of moral values. Harriet Martineau had offered the text to the publisher John Murray, but he had refused to take it on because “it was a work of infidel tendency, with the obvious aim of deprecating the authority and invalidating the veracity of the Bible.” Charles, on the other hand, found the book “curious and interesting.”
Charles made two comments towards the end of his life about when and why he had finally abandoned his Christian faith. Both point to 1849 and the years before and after as the critical time. In his Autobiography, Charles wrote that in the 1840s “disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and [I] have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct.” His second remark was reported by a visitor to Down a few years later. Charles told him: “I never gave up Christianity until I was forty years of age.” Asked why he had given up his belief at that time, he replied simply that he had investigated the “claims of Christianity” and they were “not supported by evidence.” Charles became forty in February 1849. His comment that he felt “no distress” as he came to reject Christianity was remarkable for the period, as the pain of doubt and the struggle for faith were pressing issues for many. For Charles, the issue was purely one of “the evidences.”
One writer whose books Charles read with interest in 1849 and 1850 was Francis Newman, Professor of Latin at the “Godless College” and the younger brother of John Henry, later Cardinal Newman. The two brothers had been estranged in the 1830s as John became a leading figure in the Oxford Movement with its emphasis on Church, authority and religious forms, and Francis argued with equal conviction for a liberal and critical faith. He was a central figure in “advanced” Unitarian circles and a friend of Hensleigh and Fanny Wedgwood. His History of the Hebrew Monarchy used the Higher Criticism to argue that the Old Testament could not be the word of God as it was a patchwork of texts bearing “plentiful marks of the human mind and hand.” His work on The Soul, her Sorrows and her Aspirations was subtitled An Essay towards the Natural History of the Soul, as the True Basis of Theology. Like Charles, he believed that in “organic life,” we often suffer pain or loss through the operation of natural laws which take no account of the individual’s moral state. He rejected all scriptural or doctrinal arguments for a future life, feeling that the belief in one could only ever be a personal hope based on intuition alone.
Annie had no inkling of her father’s private thoughts about religion but watched every day as he carried on his scientific work in his study. After putting away his essay on his species theory with his note to Emma in 1844, he had gone back to his Beagle notes and completed his Geological Observations on South America in which, using his maps of the continent, he showed how Lyell’s geology could be used to tell the history of the whole land mass. His account of the signs that the western rim of the continent had gradually risen through the geological eras was a tour de force of Lyell’s new method. Charles planned to start next on the evidence for his species theory, but, before doing so, he decided to look at a few remaining specimens from HMS Beagle. He had always meant to describe them, but they had sat untouched in their jars of spirits for the ten years since his return.
Charles examined some arrow worms and flatworms and wrote two papers about them. He then turned to a small barnacle. When he put it under his microscope and examined it, he was intrigued and he compared it with some others. He talked to experts in London and went back to his specimens. Within a few months, he embarked on a taxonomic study of barnacles which he acknowledged to a friend “will put off my species book for a rather long period.”
Charles’s meticulous examination of the one minute sea creature and its cousins was a remarkable change of focus from the essay of 1844 which had ranged freely over the whole natural world, but Charles had reasons for his interest, and when he eventually completed the task he had set himself, his findings fitted into place as an essential part of the work that led to The Origin of Species.
Barnacles were familiar to any Victorian child who knew the seashore of the southern or western coasts of England or Wales. The encrustations of small cones marked rocks below the high-tide mark, and any Victorian seaman would know how they also fouled ships’ bottoms, buoys and pier pilings. They looked like limpets, which were classed as molluscs, but in the 1830s it had been pointed out that they had free-floating larvae like crabs and other Crustacea, and when Charles started working on them in the mid-1840s, they were seen as a very curious class of animals which, like the zoophytes, which Charles had studied in Edinburgh, combined the characters of two major groups of organisms in a way that offered a challenge to taxonomy.
Charles had found his Beagle barnacle on one of the Chonos Islands off the southwest coast of Chile. He had been collecting molluscs and had been surprised to see that the thick shells of one species were completely drilled by a soft orange organism less than a tenth of an inch long. When he put it under his microscope back on board ship, he was fascinated to see that it was a barnacle without a shell. He then found eggs attached to it in four stages of growth. In the fourth stage, they were coffin-shaped with two “thick, clumsy legs” which reminded him of some crustacean larvae. This link, and the lack of a shell, were points to look into and write up, but when he came to do so at last in 1846, Charles found more to think about at every step.
Barnacle from the Chonos Islands
Trying to compare the soft parts of his barnacle with other species, he found that little was known about any of the group, and the taxonomy of the whole class of Cirripedia which includes the barnacles was in a muddle. Professor Owen encouraged him to do a study; the keeper of the zoological collections at the British Museum gave him full access to the museum’s specimens and lent his personal collection. Charles wrote to leading naturalists in France, Denmark, Holland, Germany and the United States, and the postman was soon bringing specimens from all over the world.
Charles had a strong reason of his own to take on the task. In 1845 he had been discussing the difficulties of distinguishing species with Hooker, and Hooker had insisted that “to be able to handle the subject at all, one must have handled hundreds of species with a view to distinguishing them, and that over a great part, or brought from a great many parts, of the globe.” Charles took this comment as a suggestion that he himself lacked the experience needed, and wrote back, with revealing sensitivity, that it did not “alter one iota my long self-acknowledged presumption in accumulating facts and speculating on the subject of variation, without having worked out my due share of species.” But he needed to gain experience and prove his ability as a taxonomist, and the cirripedes were a perfect opportunity.
Charles was to spend eight years on his specimens while dust gathered on his essay, and for all of Annie’s life from October 1846 until 1851, her father dissected barnacles under his microscope at the window of his study. G
eorge remembered that when he was small, the children all regarded this as “the natural occupation of the head of a family.” When they went one day to play with the Lubbock children at High Elms, he asked where Sir John “did his barnacles.” Charles wrote to a fellow naturalist that “most of my friends laugh.” After the first volume of his study was published in 1851, he was amused himself when Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton put a character called Professor Long, author of “Researches into the Natural History of Limpets,” into one of his novels. Another character commented that Professor Long’s subject required deep research; it was one “on which a learned man may say much without fear of contradiction,” and “the history of limpets is to a man” “what the history of man might be to a limpet.”
When Annie came into her father’s study, she found him using simple methods and few instruments. Francis wrote that “if any one had looked at his tools etcetera, lying on the table, he would have been struck by an air of simpleness, make-shift, and oddness.” His dissecting table was a low board, let into the right-hand window of the study. He sat there on his microscope stool, which had a revolving seat so that he could turn easily from side to side. He kept a few implements on the main table and he had odds and ends in the drawers of another table to the left of his microscope. The drawers were labelled “best tools,” “rough tools,” “specimens,” “preparations for specimens” and so on. Francis wrote: “The most marked peculiarity of the contents of these drawers was the care with which little scraps and almost useless things were preserved. He held the well-known belief, that if you threw a thing away you were sure to want it directly, and so things accumulated.”
In later years Francis was to help his father with his botanical observations and experiments. He noticed then how his father’s “eager desire not to lose time was seen in his quick movements when at work.” In one experiment which required some care in manipulation, “fastening the little bits of card . . . was done carefully and necessarily slowly, but the intermediate movements were all quick . . . all these processes were performed with a kind of restrained eagerness.” Francis recalled him, “as he recorded the result of some experiment, looking eagerly at each root &c, and then writing with equal eagerness. I remember the quick movement of his head up and down as he looked from the object to the notes . . . I can recall his appearance as he counted seeds under the simple microscope with an alertness not usually characterising such mechanical work as counting. I think he personified each seed as a small demon trying to elude him by getting into the wrong heap, or jumping away altogether; and this gave to the work the excitement of a game.”
Creation (Movie Tie-In) Page 16
