by Paul Johnson
ALSO BY PAUL JOHNSON
Socrates
Jesus
Churchill
Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties
A History of the Jews
The Birth of the Modern World: World Society 1815–1830
Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky
A History of the American People
Art: A New History
George Washington: The Founding Father
Creators: From Chaucer and Dürer to Picasso and Disney
Napoleon: A Penguin Life
Heroes: From Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Churchill and de Gaulle
Paul Johnson
DARWIN
Portrait of
a Genius
VIKING
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Paul Johnson, 2012
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Johnson, Paul.
Darwin : portrait of a genius / Paul Johnson.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-101-60115-0
1. Darwin, Charles, 1809–1882. 2. Naturalists—England—Biography. I. Title.
QH31.D2J64 2012
576.8'2092—dc23
[B]
2012003433
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
To my grandson Ralph
Contents
Title Page
Also by Paul Johnson
Copyright
Dedication
ONE: A Heritage of Genius, and Its Shadow
TWO: Education and Self-Education of a Scientist
THREE: The Loss of God
FOUR: The Making of a Masterpiece
FIVE: Among the Apes and Angels
SIX: How the Great Botanist Missed an Opportunity
SEVEN: Evils of Social Darwinism
EIGHT: Triumph and the Reversal of Natural Selection
Further Reading
Index
CHAPTER ONE
A Heritage of Genius,
and Its Shadow
All his life, Charles Darwin believed that inheritance was much more important in shaping a man or woman than education or environment. Nature rather than nurture was formative, in his view. Though he knew nothing of the science of genetics, and never used the word gene, which is first recorded in English in 1911, more than a quarter-century after his death, he is a classic case of genetic inheritance. Indeed, two of his grandparents and his father can reasonably be classified as geniuses.
His paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) came from an old family of modest landowners. After Cambridge, he trained as a doctor in Edinburgh, and then practiced in Litchfield, Dr. Johnson’s town (they did not get on). He was successful and had many patients, easily earning £1,000 a year, a handsome income then. News of his skill reached the ears of George III, who invited him to come to London as the royal doctor. But Dr. Darwin declined. The Hanoverian royals were slow at paying their doctors. In any case, Darwin was happy as he was, combining a busy provincial practice with poetry and science. The symbol of this dualism was his coach, which he designed himself. It was fitted up with a writing desk, a skylight, and a portion of his library, so that he could carry on his intellectual pursuits while going on his daily round of professional calls.
His mind was large, noble, and omnivorous. He was interested in every aspect of science, both theoretical and empirical. He had a maxim: “Any man who never conducts an experiment is a fool.” He read widely, in French as well as English, and two of his favorite authors were Buffon and Lamarck, both early exponents of the theory of evolution. He met and corresponded with Rousseau. He attended regular discussion groups with early industrialists and inventors, such as Watt and Boulton. His chief passions, however, were botany and animal life. As he prospered, he bought a plot of land and planted an eight-acre experimental garden. He wrote and published a two-part didactic poem, The Botanic Garden, covering “The Economy of Vegetation” and “The Loves of the Plants.” It was highly successful, much praised by the fastidious Horace Walpole, and translated into French, Italian, and Portuguese. He expanded the lore of his poem in a prose work, Phytologia; or, The Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening (1799), which contains much speculation about the generative life of plants.
However, it is his treatise Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life (1794–96), that best illustrates his imaginative genius. In it he assumed an enormous time span for the earth, a whole generation before Lyall’s geological researches established it, and speculated accurately on the successive phases of life that emerged and on its essential unity. He wrote: “As the earth and ocean were probably peopled with vegetable productions long before the existence of animals, and many families of these animals long before other families of them, shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life?” This was an extraordinarily perceptive question to ask in 1794, and the use of the term filament is particularly suggestive, as though he was already intuitively aware of the physical form of the chromosome and capable of leapfrogging over the work of his grandson, Charles Darwin, into the age of genetics.
Erasmus Darwin was an extraordinary polymath, an instinctive inventor of mechanical gadgets, and a man who had theories and ideas about everything. Large and handsome, though also clumsy and accident-prone, he was hugely attractive to women and took full advantage of the fact. Two of his illegitimate children, both clever girls, he set up in a school, and then wrote them a treatise, A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools (1797), which is full of sound advice, valid today. He was accused of skepticism in his talk, which was jocose, cynical, and “rough.” But he wrote:
Dull atheist, could a giddy dance
Of atoms lawless hurl’d
Construct so wonderful, so nice
So harmonised a world?
Twice married, he had three sons by his first wife. The eldest became a brilliant medical student at Edinburgh but died from an infection received while dissecting. The second was a flourishing solicitor but committed suicide. The third also went to Edinburgh, qualified as a doctor, and practiced at Shrewsbury, becoming in due co
urse one of the wealthiest general practitioners in England, a man famous in learned circles and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was also the father of Charles Darwin. By his second wife, Erasmus had four sons and three daughters, one of whom, Violetta, married Tertius Galton and gave birth to Francis Galton, another polymath of genius, who created the science of eugenics.
Whether Erasmus’s doctor-son, father of Charles, was a genius is a matter of opinion, but he was certainly remarkable. There seem to be two types of genius, the purely cerebral and the intuitive-cerebral, Galileo being an example of the first and Newton of the second. In his superb essay on Newton, J. M. Keynes, another genius, pointed out that Newton always took a major step forward by an intuitive leap, but then held his discovery tightly by his “strong, intellectual muscle-power,” until in due course, satisfied by its veracity, he proceeded to prove it by reason. Darwin’s father, Dr. Robert Darwin, was a man of powerful intellect, clearly, but the force of his medical skill arose from his intuitive penetration, which was essentially visual and observational, though aided by the cunning questions he put. One imagines he resembled Dr. Joseph Bell, the famous surgeon, under whom Arthur Conan Doyle worked in Edinburgh and on whom he based his character Sherlock Holmes.
In his autobiographical writings, Charles Darwin gives a striking portrait of his father, dwelling lingeringly, even a little enviously, on his intuitive gifts. Robert Darwin was an immensely hard worker, laboring long hours in his surgery and on his rounds, but he did not seek greatly to enlarge his professional knowledge: His genius lay in immediate, physical contact with the patient, on first diagnosis, on visits, and at every point in the course of the condition. He looked into and through his patients and seems to have inspired in them, almost without exception, a confidence in his capacity to cure them that was nearly miraculous. He was huge, six foot two, and correspondingly big in bone and brawn, “the largest man I ever saw,” wrote his son. But his voice was high-pitched. Robert Darwin initially disliked medicine intensely and told his son he would never have practiced it if he could have got an income any other way. But after completing his studies at Leyden, he began to practice while he was only twenty and was an immediate success. His fees during his first year paid for a servant and two horses, and so it continued, with increasing success, for sixty years. He had a particular ability to persuade women to open up and tell him their problems, which were often not so much physical as psychological. He was, in fact, a psychiatrist as well as a physician and was able to charge ten guineas a visit to the many wealthy ladies in the district. Charles Darwin quoted a young doctor as saying that his father was “wholly unscientific” but his “power of predicting the end of an illness was unparalleled.” He rightly disapproved of many injurious current practices, such as bleeding—he hated the sight of blood, a horror he passed on to his son—and his treatment was, often enough, sensible advice and reassurance, which, given the state of medical knowledge then, and the unavailability of effective drugs except opium, was just as well. The best doctors in the early nineteenth century were those who, physically, did least, and Robert Darwin was one of them. Instead, he provided wisdom and sensibility.
Erasmus Darwin was a member of the Lunar Society, whose members, the Lunatics, met on moonlit nights when their coachmen could see to drive. They included the Midland intelligentsia and successful businessmen and professionals, chiefly with a scientific bent. Though some might conform to the Church of England for social reasons, nearly all were unorthodox and many were Unitarians. Some were closet skeptics. Among them was Josiah Wedgwood, the Staffordshire potter, and Erasmus succeeded in marrying his doctor son to the potter’s eldest child, Susannah. She provided him with six children, the youngest but one being Charles. She was already forty-three when he was born, and when he was eight, she died. Although he described his father in detail, he wrote virtually nothing about his mother, and this chasm in his account of his childhood is significant. We know she was highly intelligent, lively and imaginative, capable of inspiring great affection. But Charles said nothing about his love of her or of his loss. It is a fact that, though fluent and in most ways highly communicative, Charles Darwin never spoke or wrote of the deepest things.
However, he had the Wedgwood genes, and in his maternal grandfather, another genius. There is no doubt about that. Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795) was the thirteenth and youngest child of an old and highly prolific Midland family, which could trace itself back to the fifteenth century and beyond. Many had been involved in the primitive pottery trade that flourished in northern Staffordshire, especially in Burslem, where Josiah was born. His father died when he was eight, and he was immediately taken from school and put to work. He thus had virtually no education. But his intelligence was enormous, versatile, highly flexible, and above all, practical. He was an empirical scientist on a superhu-man scale. By his early twenties, he was running his own “family” of potbanks, and over the next forty years, he transformed a clumsy handicraft trade into a vast domestic and export industry employing a range of high technologies. He improved every aspect of the business by an endless series of careful and judicious experiments. He introduced uniformity in the plates, so they could be piled without cracking. His teapot lids fitted exactly; his spouts poured gently; his handles could be held without burning the finger. Without any theoretical training or knowledge, he got to understand the physics of baking pots, the chemistry of glazes, dyes, and colors, the geology of clays, and the machinery of mass production. In every department, his changes were fundamental and, eventually, highly successful. Even more remarkable, perhaps, he showed an extraordinary talent for design and a gift for introducing new materials, combinations, and colorings, which gave his pottery, especially the revolutionary Jasperware, an elegance and distinction that led to its worldwide fame. He built an entirely new factory at a place he called Etruria and made it the center of a network of canals and roads. He provided houses and a school, on new and progressive lines. Not least, he showed huge powers of salesmanship and financial acumen so that, when he died, aged sixty-four, he left to his heirs an immense business plus half a million pounds in cash.
As the progeny of three such remarkable men, Eramus and Robert Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood—the imaginative genius, the intuitive genius, and the empirical genius—Charles Darwin had access to a gene pool of the highest possible quality. Some points are worth noting. First, all three forebears were skillful at handling money and amassed it with the seemingly effortless ease that financial wizards show. Hence Charles Darwin was able to become a gentleman-scientist without the smallest difficulty and remain one all his life. He never had to worry about money. He did worry about money—he worried about everything—but he never had to compromise, limit, or adjust his scientific activities for financial reasons. Thus he was virtually unique among famous scientists. Moreover, he inherited the talent for managing money, unlike his codiscoverer and rival, Alfred Russel Wallace, who came from a family of financial bunglers and bankrupts and got into a mess in his turn, from which Darwin rescued him. Not that the Darwins and Wedgwoods were all wizards with coin: Both families had their share of personal boom-and-busters (Charles’s solicitor uncle was one). But Charles Darwin, though he never earned a penny in salary and made scarcely £10,000 from his books in his lifetime, grew steadily richer, and in his last years had an investment income alone of over £8,000 a year, leaving at his death a fortune of “at least” £280,000. (By comparison, Dickens, for all his bestsellers and spectacular readings, left just under £90,000. Palmerston, over fifty years in well-paid office, with successful investments in land, slateworks, and a port, left under £100,000.)
The Darwin and Wedgwood families were thus favored by wealth makers and preservers, as well as spendthrifts. They were highly philoprogenitive and clustered in great family groups, living nearby and thus often intermarrying. Charles Darwin conformed to genotype in both respects, marrying his first cousin and begetting ten children, seven of whom sur
vived to maturity. There were a number of tragic cases among the Darwin-Wedgwood cousinhoods. Erasmus Darwin’s first wife, Charles Darwin’s paternal grandmother, took to drinking gin and died an alcoholic, by no means unusual among wealthy English ladies in the second half of the eighteenth century, as Thomas Rowlandson suggests with his superb watercolor, The Morning Dram. She was not the only drunk in the clan, and there were cases of drug addiction, too (opium), also common enough, especially in the years 1800–1850. And there were several suicides.
In general, however, the family confederation did well and populated the Midlands and the south of England with well-to-do families of professionals and businessmen, who kept in touch and made their own networks of friends. Charles Darwin was thus born into a teeming and valuable acquaintance, which he assiduously maintained and polished all his life, in many different ways but especially by a vast correspondence. Its characteristics were high intelligence, an interest in technical and scientific matters, religious unorthodoxy or disbelief, industry, and persistence. Fellows of the Royal Society and fellows of the Geographical, Geological, Botanical, and other learned societies were common. Acquisitiveness, not just in money and property, but in specimens of every kind, from butterflies to fossils, was almost universal, and the comfortable rectories and purpose-built villas in which the families lived were crammed with books and cases of stuffed birds and animals, rocks and potsherds, their spacious gardens often containing ranks of specimen trees and exotic shrubs. Gardens, servants of all kinds, and children of all ages abounded. Darwin conformed to this pattern in every respect, during all his mortal existence.
There was one shadow, however. Among Erasmus Darwin’s friends was Joseph Priestley, minister and theologian variously described as an Arminian, Socinian, and an atheist but chiefly remarkable for his work as an experimental chemist, as the discoverer of oxygen. From time to time, writings of his were publicly burned, but he was generally left alone until the coming of the French Revolution raised political passions. He foolishly described his political Letters, published in 1790, as “grains of Gunpowder” for which his opponents were “providing the match.” Hence he was called Gunpowder Priestley. It was an age of “constitutional societies,” formed to support the French Revolution and press for similar reforms in England, and also of Church-and-King organizations to oppose them. On July 14, 1791, Priestley was invited to address a meeting in Birmingham to commemorate the anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille, but having been warned of danger, he declined to attend. Even so, a Church-and-King mob surrounded his house at Fairhill, near Birmingham, and burned it, destroying nearly all his books, scientific apparatus, and papers. Priestley escaped with his life, but order was not restored for three days. Four rioters were hanged, Priestley received some compensation, and friends enabled him to resettle in London. But he never felt safe again, and in 1794 he emigrated to New York. The victimization and enforced exile of Priestley became a defining event in the Darwin family, and among all their dissenting and unorthodox friends. Charles Darwin was vividly conscious of it, more so indeed than his grandfather and father. What terrified him was the religious dimension of the event. It left him with an abiding fear of the possible consequences of offending the tender consciences of Church of England clergymen, who might then be inspired to stir up a mob to burn and kill. The cry of the mob, who were said to have called out “No philosophers—Church and King for ever!” and “Burn the atheists!” always echoed in his subconscious and preyed on his nerves. It gave to his life and work a dimension of worry that had enormous consequences.
