Marx’s monument may be out of scale, but his presence could not be more appropriate. Marx lived most of his life in London, following exile from Belgium, Germany, and France for his activity in the revolution of 1848 (and for general political troublemaking: he and Engels had just published the Communist Manifesto). Marx arrived in London in August 1848, at age thirty-one, and lived there until his death in 1883. He wrote all his mature works as an expatriate in England; and the great (and free) library of the British Museum served as his research base for Das Kapital.
Let me now introduce another anomaly, not so easily resolved this time, about the death of Karl Marx in London. This item, in fact, ranks as my all-time-favorite, niggling little incongruity from the history of my profession of evolutionary biology. I have been living with this bothersome fact for twenty-five years, and I made a pledge to myself long ago that I would try to discover some resolution before ending this series of essays. Let us, then, return to Highgate Cemetery, and to Karl Marx’s burial on March 17, 1883.
Friedrich Engels, Marx’s lifelong friend and collaborator (also his financial “angel,” thanks to a family textile business in Manchester), reported the short, small, and modest proceedings (see Philip S. Foner, ed., Karl Marx Remembered: Comments at the Time of His Death [San Francisco: Synthesis Publications, 1983]). Engels himself gave a brief speech in English that included the following widely quoted comment: “Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.” Contemporary reports vary somewhat, but the most generous count places only nine mourners at the gravesite—a disconnect between immediate notice and later influence exceeded, perhaps, only by Mozart’s burial in a pauper’s grave. (I exclude, of course, famous men like Bruno and Lavoisier, executed by state power and therefore officially denied any funerary rite.)
The list, not even a minyan in length, makes sense (with one exception): Marx’s wife and daughter (another daughter had died recently, thus increasing Marx’s depression and probably hastening his end); his two French socialist sons-in-law, Charles Longuet and Paul Lafargue; and four nonrelatives with long-standing ties to Marx, and impeccable socialist and activist credentials: Wilhelm Liebknecht, a founder and leader of the German Social-Democratic Party (who gave a rousing speech in German, which, together with Engels’s English oration, a short statement in French by Longuet, and the reading of two telegrams from workers’ parties in France and Spain, constituted the entire program of the burial); Friedrich Lessner, sentenced to three years in prison at the Cologne Communist trial of 1852; G. Lochner, described by Engels as “an old member of the Communist League”; and Carl Schorlemmer, a professor of chemistry in Manchester, but also an old communist associate of Marx and Engels, and a fighter at Baden in the last uprising of the 1848 revolution.
But the ninth and last mourner seems to fit about as well as that proverbial snowball in hell or that square peg trying to squeeze into a round hole: E. Ray Lankester (1847–1929), already a prominent young British evolutionary biologist and leading disciple of Darwin, but later to become—as Professor Sir E. Ray Lankester K.C.B. (Knight, Order of the Bath), M.A. (the “earned” degree of Oxford or Cambridge), D.Sc. (a later honorary degree as doctor of science), F.R.S. (Fellow of the Royal Society, the leading honorary academy of British science)—just about the most celebrated, and the stuffiest, of conventional and socially prominent British scientists. Lankester moved up the academic ladder from exemplary beginnings to a maximally prominent finale, serving as professor of zoology at University College London, then as Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution, and finally as Linacre Professor of Comparative Anatomy at Oxford University. Lankester then capped his career by serving as director (from 1898 to 1907) of the British Museum (Natural History), the most powerful and prestigious post in his field. Why, in heaven’s name, was this exemplar of British respectability, this basically conservative scientist’s scientist, hanging out with a group of old (and mostly German) communists at the funeral of a man described by Engels, in his graveside oration, as “the best hated and most calumniated man of his times”?
Even Engels seemed to sense the anomaly, when he ended his official report of the funeral, published in Der Sozialdemokrat of Zurich on March 22, 1883, by writing: “The natural sciences were represented by two celebrities of the first rank, the zoology Professor Ray Lankester and the chemistry Professor Schorlemmer, both members of the Royal Society of London.” Yes, but Schorlemmer was a countryman, a lifelong associate, and a political ally. Lankester did not meet Marx until 1880, and could not, by any stretch of imagination, be called a political supporter, or even a sympathizer (beyond a very general, shared belief in human improvement through education and social progress). As I shall discuss in detail later in this essay, Marx first sought Lankester’s advice in recommending a doctor for his ailing wife and daughter, and later for himself. This professional connection evidently developed into a firm friendship. But what could have drawn these maximally disparate people together?
We certainly cannot seek the primary cause for warm sympathy in any radical cast to Lankester’s biological work that might have matched the tenor of Marx’s efforts in political science. Lankester may rank as the best evolutionary morphologist in the first generation that worked through the implications of Darwin’s epochal discovery. T. H. Huxley became Lankester’s guide and mentor, while Darwin certainly thought well of his research, writing to Lankester (then a young man of twenty-five) on April 15, 1872: “What grand work you did at Naples! [at the marine research station]. I can clearly see that you will some day become our first star in Natural History.” But Lankester’s studies now read as little more than an exemplification and application of Darwin’s insights to several specific groups of organisms—a “filling in” that often follows a great theoretical advance, and that seems, in retrospect, not overly blessed with originality.
As his most enduring contribution, Lankester proved that the ecologically diverse spiders, scorpions, and horseshoe crabs form a coherent evolutionary group, now called the Chelicerata, within the arthropod phylum. Lankester’s research ranged widely from protozoans to mammals. He systematized the terminology and evolutionary understanding of embryology, and he wrote an important paper on “degeneration,” showing that Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection led only to local adaptation, not to general progress, and that such immediate improvement will often be gained (in many parasites, for example) by morphological simplification and loss of organs.
Karl Marx’s grave site in Highgate Cemetery, London
In a fair and generous spirit, one might say that Lankester experienced the misfortune of residing in an “in between” generation that had imbibed Darwin’s insights for reformulating biology, but did not yet possess the primary tool—an understanding of the mechanism of inheritance—so vitally needed for the next great theoretical step. But then, people make their own opportunities, and Lankester, already in his grumpily conservative maturity, professed little use for Mendel’s insights upon their rediscovery at the outset of the twentieth century.
In the first biography ever published—the document that finally provided me with enough information to write this essay after a gestation period of twenty-five years!—Joseph Lester, with editing and additional material by Peter Bowler, assessed Lankester’s career in a fair and judicious way (E. Ray Lankester and the Making of British Biology, British Society for the History of Science, 1995):
Evolutionary morphology was one of the great scientific enterprises of the late nineteenth century. By transmuting the experiences gained by their predecessors in the light of the theory of evolution, morphologists such as Lankester threw new light on the nature of organic structures and created an overview of the evolutionary relationships that might exist between different forms. . . . Lankester gained an international reputation as a biologist, but his name is largely forgotten today. He came onto the scene just too late to be involv
ed in the great Darwinian debate, and his creative period was over before the great revolutions of the early twentieth century associated with the advent of Mendelian genetics. He belonged to a generation whose work has been largely dismissed as derivative, a mere filling in of the basic details of how life evolved.
Lankester’s conservative stance deepened with the passing years, thus increasing the anomaly of his early friendship with Karl Marx. His imposing figure only enhanced his aura of staid respectability (Lankester stood well over six feet tall, and he became quite stout, in the manner then favored by men of high station). He spent his years of retirement writing popular articles on natural history for newspapers, and collecting them into several successful volumes. But few of these pieces hold up well today, for his writing lacked both the spark and the depth of the great British essayists in natural history: T. H. Huxley, J. B. S. Haldane, J. S. Huxley, and P. B. Medawar.
As the years wore on, Lankester became ever more stuffy and isolated in his elitist attitudes and fealty to a romanticized vision of a more gracious past. He opposed the vote for women, and became increasingly wary of democracy and mass action. He wrote in 1900: “Germany did not acquire its admirable educational system by popular demand . . . the crowd cannot guide itself, cannot help itself in its blind impotence.” He excoriated all “modern” trends in the arts, especially cubism in painting and self-expression (rather than old-fashioned storytelling) in literature. He wrote to his friend H. G. Wells in 1919: “The rubbish and self-satisfied bosh which pours out now in magazines and novels is astonishing. The authors are so set upon being ‘clever,’ ‘analytical,’ and ‘up-to-date,’ and are really mere prattling infants.”
As a senior statesman of science, Lankester kept his earlier relationship with Marx safely hidden. He confessed to his friend and near contemporary A. Conan Doyle (who had modeled the character of Professor Challenger in The Lost World upon Lankester), but he never told the young communist J. B. S. Haldane, whom he befriended late in life and admired greatly, that he had known Karl Marx. When, upon the fiftieth anniversary of the Highgate burial, the Marx-Engels Institute of Moscow tried to obtain reminiscences from all people who had known Karl Marx, Lankester, by then the only living witness of Marx’s funeral, replied curtly that he had no letters and would offer no personal comments.
Needless to say, neither the fate of the world nor the continued progress of evolutionary biology depends in the slightest perceptible degree upon a resolution of this strange affinity between two such different people. But little puzzles gnaw at the soul of any scholar, and answers to small problems sometimes lead to larger insights rooted in the principles utilized for explanation. I believe that I have developed a solution, satisfactory (at least) for the dissolution of my own former puzzlement. But, surprisingly to me, I learned no decisive fact from the literature that finally gave me enough information to write this essay—the recent Lankester biography mentioned above, and two excellent articles on the relationship of Marx and Lankester: “The friendship of Edwin Ray Lankester and Karl Marx,” by Lewis S. Feuer (Journal of the History of Ideas 40 [1979]: 633–48), and “Marx’s Darwinism: a historical note,” by Diane B. Paul (Socialist Review 13 [1983]: 113—20). Rather, my proposed solution invokes a principle that may seem disappointing and entirely uninteresting at first, but that may embody a generality worth discussing, particularly for the analysis of historical sequences—a common form of inquiry in both human biography and evolutionary biology. In short, I finally realized that I had been asking the wrong question all along.
A conventional solution would try to dissolve the anomaly by arguing that Marx and Lankester shared far more similarity in belief or personality than appearances would indicate, or at least that each man hoped to gain something direct and practical from the relationship. But I do not think that this ordinary form of argument can possibly prevail in this case.
To be sure, Lankester maintained a highly complex and, in some important ways, almost secretive personality beneath his aura of Establishment respectability. But he displayed no tendencies at all to radicalism in politics, and he surely included no Marxist phase in what he might later have regarded as the folly of youth. But Lankester did manifest a fierce independence of spirit, a kind of dumb courage in the great individualistic British tradition of “I’ll do as I see fit, and bugger you or the consequences”—an attitude that inevitably attracted all manner of personal trouble, but that also might have led Lankester to seek interesting friendships that more timid or opportunistic colleagues would have shunned.
Despite his basically conservative views in matters of biological theory, Lankester was a scrappy fighter by nature, an indomitable contrarian who relished professional debate, and never shunned acrimonious controversy. In a remarkable letter, his mentor T. H. Huxley, perhaps the most famous contrarian in the history of British biology, warned his protégé about the dangers of sapping time and strength in unnecessary conflict, particularly in the calmer times that had descended after the triumph of Darwin’s revolution. Huxley wrote to Lankester on December 6, 1888:
Seriously, I wish you would let an old man, who has had his share of fighting, remind you that battles, like hypotheses, are not to be multiplied beyond necessary. . . . You have a fair expectation of ripe vigor for twenty years; just think what may be done with that capital. No use to tu quoque me [“thou also”—that is, you did it yourself]. Under the circumstances of the time, warfare has been my business and duty.
To cite the two most public examples of his scrappy defense of science and skepticism, Lankester unmasked the American medium Henry Slade in September 1876. Slade specialized in seances (at high fees), featuring spirits that wrote messages on a slate. Lankester, recognizing Slade’s modus operandi, grabbed the slate from the medium’s hands just before the spirits should have begun their ghostly composition. The slate already contained the messages supposedly set for later transmission from a higher realm of being. Lankester then sued Slade for conspiracy, but a magistrate found the medium guilty of the lesser charge of vagrancy, and sentenced him to three months at hard labor. Slade appealed and won on a technicality. The dogged Lankester then filed a new summons, but Slade decided to pack up and return to a more gullible America. (As an interesting footnote in the history of evolutionary biology, the spiritualistically inclined Alfred Russel Wallace testified on Slade’s behalf, while Darwin, on the opposite side of rational skepticism, quietly contributed funds for Lankester’s efforts in prosecution.)
Three years later, in the summer of 1879, Lankester visited the laboratory of the great French physician and neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. To test his theories on the role of electricity and magnetism in anesthesia, Charcot induced insensitivity by telling a patient to hold an electromagnet, energized by a bichromate battery, in her hand. Charcot then thrust large carpet needles into her affected arm and hand, apparently without causing any pain.
The skeptical Lankester, no doubt remembering the similar and fallacious procedures of Mesmer a century before, suspected psychological suggestion, rather than any physical effect of magnetism, as the cause of anesthesia. When Charcot left the room, Lankester surreptitiously emptied the chemicals out of the battery and replaced the fluid with ordinary water, thus disabling the device. He then urged Charcot to repeat the experiment—with the same result of full anesthesia! Lankester promptly confessed what he had done, and fully expected to be booted out of Charcot’s lab tout de suite. But the great French scientist grabbed his hand and exclaimed, “Well done, Monsieur,” and a close friendship then developed between the two men.
One additional, and more conjectural, matter must be aired as we try to grasp the extent of Lankester’s personal unconventionalities (despite his conservative stance in questions of biological theory) for potential insight into his willingness to ignore the social norms of his time. The existing literature maintains a wall of total silence on this issue, but the pattern seems unmistakable. Lankester remained a bachelor, althoug
h he often wrote about his loneliness and his desires for family life. He was twice slated for marriage, but both fiancées broke their engagements for mysterious and unstated reasons. He took long European vacations nearly every year, and nearly always to Paris, where he maintained clear distance from his professional colleagues. Late in life, Lankester became an intimate platonic friend and admirer of the great ballerina Anna Pavlova. I can offer no proof, but if these behaviors don’t point toward the love that may now be freely discussed, but then dared not speak its name (to paraphrase the one great line written by Oscar Wilde’s paramour, Lord Alfred Douglas), well, then, Professor Lankester was far more mysterious and secretive than even I can imagine.
The famous Vanity Fair caricature of E. Ray Lankester, drawn by Spy.
Still, none of these factors, while they may underscore Lankester’s general willingness to engage in contentious and unconventional behavior, can explain any special propensity for friendship with a man like Karl Marx. (In particular, orthodox Marxists have always taken a dim view of personal, particularly sexual, idiosyncrasy as a self-centered diversion from the social goal of revolution.) Lankester did rail against the social conservatives of his day, particularly against hidebound preachers who opposed evolution, and university professors who demanded the standard curriculum of Latin and Greek in preference to any newfangled study of natural science.
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