by Paul Johnson
The book ought to be popular with a large body of scientific and semi-scientific readers, as it bears on agriculture, the history of our domestic productions and on the whole fields of Zoology, Botany and Geology. . . . I have been quite surprised at finding how much interested strangers and acquaintances have been in the subject. Only some small portions are at all abstruse.
This was a very shrewd estimate. Indeed, once Darwin had decided to take the plunge and publish a popular version of his theory, all his actions—writing, publishing, promoting, and marketing—were highly professional and wholeheartedly directed to making Origin the greatest success, both with the scientific elite and the public. The text, in particular, was a nicely judged blend, which mingled clarity and comprehensibility with professional vernacular and decorum, calculated not to offend experts by writing down, or laymen by jargon. The only concession was a useful glossary of terms. Otherwise the entire book was without academic mystification or scaffolding.
There was a brief introduction, in which Darwin cleverly apologized for not quoting his sources or acknowledging his precursors (after the book became a success, he added a “Historical Introduction” for later editions). Then followed fourteen chapters, each headed by a digest of contents and usually ending with a short summary. The first chapter was on domestication, showing how human breeding had produced variations of species in plants and animals. The second describes how variations occur under nature. The third is entitled “Struggle for Existence” and describes the background against which species develop the means of survival. Chapter 4, “Natural Selection,” is the argumentative core of the book, concluding with the “grouping of all organic beings” into one endless chain of descent. There follow chapters on “Laws of Variation,” answers to “Difficulties on Theory,” on instinct as a force in evolution, on hybridism, on the geological record and its “imperfection,” on the geological succession of organic beings, on their geographical distribution (two chapters), and on classification. The final chapter is entitled “Recapitulation and Conclusion.” Darwin was evidently conscious throughout of the less tutored reader and was eager to help him (or her, as the book had an unusually high percentage of women readers); he was also mindful of the clerical or religious objector, answering difficulties as he went along. No scientific innovator has ever taken more trouble to smooth the way for lay readers without descending into vulgarity. What is almost miraculous about the book is Darwin’s generosity in sharing his thought processes, his lack of condescension. There is no talking down, but no hauteur, either. It is a gentlemanly book.
There are four particular reasons for its success with the reader. First, from start to finish, it is a long, sustained argument. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish in a book of 155,000 words, and it would have been quite impossible if Darwin had published at the much greater length he originally intended. The reader is made to feel he is taking part in a great adventure of the mind and gets a thrill of accomplishment in following it step-by-step.
Second, Darwin makes it unconsciously easier by the large number of examples he gives from botany and zoology. People love plants and animals and delight in their peculiarities and exoticisms. Darwin gives plenty of both from the vast range of his knowledge. Neither Wallace nor any other naturalist then active could have managed so wide and fluent a process of vivid illustration. He is, of course, generous with topics he knows will fascinate, especially, for instance, bees running their hives and ants managing their slaves.
Third, Darwin deals with the problem of God and revelation with fine judgment and exquisite tact. He does not offend the strict scientists by ducking the issue. He repeatedly points to the higher probability of selection by nature over creation. He is never actually cowardly. On the other hand, he is never provocative. He avoids the issue of man’s descent almost entirely. Only in the third paragraph from the end of the book does he predict that “in the distant future,” psychology and mental power will be investigated, and “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” We have to distinguish between what Darwin actually wrote and what people read into the book. It is clear, from the first week Origin was published, that everyone concluded man was inevitably part of the theory. It was their first reaction on finishing the book. But Darwin nowhere says that man was descended from apes. What he does say, in his last two paragraphs, is designed to be reassuring and uplifting. We can all “look with some confidence to a secure future.” Natural selection, he insists, “works solely by and for the good of each being” and “all mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.” That was exactly what the Victorian public, with its love of reform and improvement, wished to hear. And better followed. Nature might be in perpetual war, said Darwin, but from this struggle the evolution of “higher animals” directly followed. So “there is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one.”
The final sentence concludes that, while the planet has gone “cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” This highly optimistic ending thus managed to encompass both the reassuring certitude of Newtonian cosmology and, with the phrase “breathed into,” an echo of Genesis and what most readers would have seen as a reference to God as prime mover.
Origin, then, was a cleverly written, superbly presented, and even a cunningly judged book, and quite apart from its veracity deserved to have an enormous impact and sell widely. But it was, and is, open to one objection. This springs from the original excitement and emotion in which Darwin conceived his theory of natural selection, the combination of the impact upon him of the Tierra del Fuegan “savages,” the Galápagos beaks, the coral atolls, and Malthus’s tract. His emotions convinced him that the “horror scenario” was the way nature operated, and he imparted this feeling to his book. The result, in the long term, was to have malign, even catastrophic, consequences. It is not that Darwin was able to demonstrate that all improvements in a species, or most, or even some of them, are the result of continual warfare and destruction. He gives very few examples of the horrific destructiveness of nature and certainly never demonstrates, by an overwhelming evidence of examples, that nature invariably or habitually or even often exacts a terrible price in suffering for each forward step. He does not do so because he never possessed such evidence. It was always an assumption. What he does do, and it is highly effective in conveying an impression of endless antagonism within and between species, is to use a selective, repetitive and emotional vocabulary of strife.
Occasionally Darwin gives a dramatic picture of natural warfare, as in his description of the primeval American forest in the chapter “Struggle for Existence”:
What a struggle between the several kinds of trees must have gone on over long centuries . . . what war between insect and insect—between insects, snails and other animals, with birds and beasts of prey—all striving to increase, and all feeding on each other or on the trees or their seeds and seedlings, or on the other plants which first clothed the grounds and thus checked the growth of the trees!
As a rule, however, the effect is achieved by pitting the text with key words and phrases, all bellicose or militaristic. The word struggle is found on almost every page, sometimes two or three times. The “struggle for existence,” the “race for life,” the “battle for life,” and “great battle for life” crop up continually. We hear again and again of “forces,” “war between insect and insect,” “invasion,” “intruders,” of “foreigners” who are “taking possession of the land,” of plants and animals being “rigidly destroyed,” of constant “attacks,” of species being “beaten” or being “victorious.” The words destroy, extinct, and extermination occur many times. Malthus rears his misleading head repeatedly: his “doctrine” of births proceeding “in geometrical ratio”—a term Darwin uses repeatedly without ev
er explaining what he means by it or how he justifies employing it. All he says is that “it applies with manifest truth to the whole animal and vegetable kingdom.” He terrifies the reader with a vision of “fifteen million elephants” suddenly appearing if these creatures—whom he picks as the slowest in procreating—are allowed to do so unchecked, and he has further catastrophic visions of the earth so crowded with animals that none could move. Hence the need for continual and colossal killings.
As it happens, Darwin, displaying the ambiguity that was one of his most marked characteristics, quails before the bloodthirsty visions he conjures up and tries to comfort the terrified reader by softening them in such a way as to refute much of what he has just said. Thus at one point, he suddenly states that climate, rather than war within or between species, is by far the greatest check on numbers, thus shoving the battle scenario offstage. At another, he abruptly announces that “natural selection will always act very slowly, often only at long intervals of time, and generally on only a very few of the inhabitants of the same region at the same time.” This is a very different picture from the incessant struggle that he portrays elsewhere, which forms the general impression left with the reader. The truth, of course, is that the fossil record gives no evidence of struggle, and Darwin’s next sentence shows why he introduced the qualification: “This very slow, intermittent action of natural selection accords perfectly well with what geology tells us of the rate and manner at which the inhabitants of this world have changed.”
These qualifications produced a visual image of natural selection that accorded much more closely with the detailed evidence of its operation among both vegetable and animal life. But it was a much less exciting one. The picture that prevailed in readers’ minds was the horror/war version, and this was the final factor in making Origin the huge success it became, and remains. To this we now turn.
CHAPTER FIVE
Among the Apes and Angels
The Origin of Species was sold to the trade on November 22, 1859, and immediately fully subscribed at 1,250 copies, and a new imprint of 3,000 was ordered for January. It was available to the public from November 25. The timing could not have been better. Everyone was talking about race, for the United States was moving toward civil war on the issue of slavery and whether the Southern states had the right to maintain it. A week after the book came out, John Brown was hanged, and his body was marching on in the minds of men and women on both sides of the Atlantic, even before the famous song was composed. Two notable books published earlier in the year had prepared the way. John Stuart Mills’s Essay on Liberty, the classic statement on the right to hold and publish dissenting opinions, gave powerful intellectual support to Darwin’s scientific challenge to religious orthodoxy. And Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, a bestseller that soon was to winch up a record sale of 220,000 copies, was a salutary tale of how able, industrious, and dedicated people rose to wealth and fame: how the fittest not only survived but prospered.
It is astonishing how quickly the intellectual elite possessed themselves of Origin. George Eliot’s diary of November 23 records that she and her partner, George Lewes “began reading Darwin’s work Origin of Species tonight.” She was critical: “It seems not to be well-written: though full of interesting matter, it is not impressive, from want of luminous and orderly presentation.” Later she became more favorable and eventually enthusiastic, though she was worried by what she called its determinism. Lewes wrote a long and widely circulated article welcoming the book—a piece that delighted Darwin. Marx and Engels were both reading it the week of publication and exchanging views. Marx was enthusiastic, as the book was “a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history,” and he determined to use the theory of natural selection as a weapon in his ideological war. In a letter on January 28, 1860, Jane Carlyle reported that “Darwin, in a Book that all the scientific world is in ecstasy over, proved the other day, that we all come from shell-fish!” But “I did not feel that the slightest light would be thrown on my practical life for me by having it ever so logically made out, that my first ancestor millions of millions of ages back had been, or even had not been, an oyster!” She complained bitterly of being pushed into reading a similar book by a woman, Isabelle Duncan’s Pre-Adamite Man. Letters and diaries of November–January 1859–60, of which dozens mention the Origin, make it clear that despite Darwin’s deliberate avoidance of the issue of man’s descent, everyone took up the ape-into-man issue, and the cartoonists soon followed, delighted by their discovery that Darwin, with his beetling brows, could easily be caricatured as an ape.
Darwin, it turned out, was a superb self-publicist, all the more effective because others did the promotion for him, and he could never be detected in pushing his own work. But over the years, he had developed a huge network of scientific friends and correspondents, and now many of them rallied to him. The text of Origin discreetly and ingeniously encouraged this camaraderie. Though Darwin did not use footnotes, he refers to dozens of other active scientists in the text, often with a generous word of praise. One has published “a grand work,” another has “forcibly” or “brilliantly” or “luminously” explained a problem. The tone is not exactly sycophantic, but it comes close. And these savants reciprocated. In America, Professor Asa Gray, Darwin’s chief supporter there, held a meeting at Harvard as early as May 1859 to announce to scholars in the field that Darwin’s book would shortly be published and to give a résumé of its contents. Lyell conducted a similar prepublication exercise at the summer 1859 annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. This was one reason sales of the book got off to such a good start. Reviews were mixed, of course, but the expected onslaught did not take place. And there were some remarkable accolades, chiefly delivered by members of Darwin’s network. Thomas Henry Huxley, who did not agree with everything in Origin by any means at this point, was determined to be pugnaciously on Darwin’s side as a matter of simple team spirit, scientists versus clerics.
By a stroke of luck, the regular Times reviewer was unwilling to get involved and gladly handed over his task to Huxley, who used the opportunity for all it was worth. This was a period when the Times, under the great John Delane, was the most influential publication in the country. Moreover, as the Times review was anonymous, Huxley was able to do a further enthusiastic review, under his own name, in the Westminster. Asa Gray provided one of the longest and most helpful reviews in the Atlantic Monthly, America’s most important periodical. This was spread over three monthly issues, each installment containing four thousand words. Naturally Darwin was pleased, and his stealthy self-promoting instincts were thoroughly roused. He got the entire twelve-thousand-word accolade reprinted in London as a pamphlet, five hundred copies of which were run off and distributed by him to every reputable library, laboratory, and scientific institution in the country and to large numbers of individual scholars and opinion formers. He compiled lists of learned men in two columns, one “for,” the other “against,” and noted with satisfaction that the list of savants on his side was longer, and lengthening. Darwin was quite clear that if he could get significant scientists of repute to acknowledge the value of his work (they did not need to agree with all or even most of his conclusions), then it would survive and prosper. He was quite convinced from the start that the younger men would appreciate, and most would follow, him. It was the older men he feared.
Chief among them was Richard Owen, the leading anatomist in Britain. All Darwin’s considerable efforts to befriend, placate, and conciliate Owen, and the compliments he paid him, all the favorable mentions in Origin, were to no avail. He has been called “an implacable enemy” of Darwin’s. This is not true. He gave the book a critical analysis in the Edinburgh Review, but it was reasoned, not exactly hostile, and certainly not malicious. The worst he ever said of Darwin was (to Charles Kingsley): “Darwin is just as good a soul as his grandfather—and just as great a goose.” But Darwin eventually came to hate
Owen, the only scientist toward whom he felt bitter, and regretted his previous civility and hospitality: “I am getting more savage against him,” he wrote. “He ought to be ostracized by every Naturalist in England.”
What is clear, in general, is that Origin met much less hostility than Darwin had always feared. There was no abuse at all. Still less was there any organized attempt to attack, ban, boycott, or prevent the sale of the book. It is highly significant that Mudie’s, the leading circulating library, which was often absurdly sensitive about books that offended religious or moral feelings, took five hundred copies, a very large order indeed for them, especially of a nonfiction work—and more than one third of the first edition. That amounts almost to a stamp of approval from society. The churches, and not least the Church of England, were surprisingly uncombative. There was a reason for this, another instance of Darwin’s phenomenal good luck. The Church was always much more interested, and ferocious, in waging internal battles over doctrine than in seeking to repel scientific boarders. At the time Origin appeared, the conservative element in Anglicanism was gearing itself up for the forthcoming publication of Essays and Reviews in 1860, a widely predicted “frontal assault” on orthodoxy by a group of liberal clergymen. This aroused an enormous uproar before, during, and after publication, and a rash of legal actions to deprive the perpetrators of the outrage of their benefices and orders. By comparison, Origin slipped through almost unchallenged. There were some critical reviews by the clergy. On the other hand, some clerics were favorable. The Reverend F. J. A. Hunt, prominent as one of the scholars who produced the revision of the New Testament, wrote: “I am inclined to think it unanswerable. In any case it is a treat to read such a book.”
