Charles Darwin

by A. N. Wilson

  In preparation for the master’s new way of life, Syms Covington, who was becoming slightly deaf,35 left Darwin’s employ at the end of 1838. His last act of service had been to make a fair copy of Darwin’s paper on the geology of Glen Roy – nearly ninety pages, which were submitted to the Royal Society of London. It is not clear why Covington decided to leave. Emma, who variously spelt his name Cavington and Cuvington, told Darwin in a letter of 30 November ‘I am afraid poor Cavington will hate the sight of me.’36 Half-hearted efforts by the young people to get Covington a new situation were unavailing, and the man emigrated to Australia in 1839. Before they were married, Emma had engaged a housemaid and was looking round for a new manservant for Darwin. Covington was given £1 as a leaving present. A butler was engaged who turned out to be a thief; he was replaced by Joseph Parslow, who remained with the Darwins until their old age.

  Darwin and Emma Wedgwood were married at Maer on 29 January 1839. The vicar, John Allen Wedgwood, took what was a subdued service – indeed an ‘awful ceremony’ in Darwin’s eyes.37 Darwin’s sister Caroline was preoccupied by the sickness of a baby, a ‘poor puny little delicate thing’. Mrs Wedgwood, Emma’s mother, was confined to bed with flu. Emma’s elder sister Elizabeth was in a gloom at losing her. Having considered the idea of a honeymoon journey, Charles and his bride decided they did not have the ‘steam up’ for it.38 Even the modest scheme of a day-trip to Warwick Castle was abandoned, and they set off almost directly for London sustained by nothing more festive than sandwiches washed down with a bottle of water.

  They soon settled into a routine of comforting dullness in Macaw Cottage. ‘I fear poor Emma must find her life rather monotonous,’ Darwin confessed to his sister. He rose at seven promptly (‘following Sir W[alter] Scott’s rule, for, as he says, once turn on your side, & all is over’), leaving Emma ‘dreadful sleepy & comfortable’.39 He then worked for three hours. At ten, they breakfasted together. Then they sat ‘in our arm chairs’ until half past eleven. Emma then sat ‘quiet as a mouse’ in his room while he worked until luncheon at two. In the afternoons they sometimes sauntered out together. They dined at six, then sat ‘in an apoplectic state’ until half past seven.40 Darwin was learning German, to which he devoted his evening while sipping tea. Occasionally they gave a dinner-party, with the butler in his best livery. They sat for their portraits by George Richmond (who did drawings of them, not paintings). Jos II gave them a piano, which Emma played each day. They went to church at King’s College in the Strand, rather than to any of the local churches in Bloomsbury, presumably in the hope of getting an intellectual sermon. It was after church one morning in June that, rather to Darwin’s horror, Captain FitzRoy surfaced – ‘more especially to make my bow to Mrs Darwin’. This letter was left at their door, ‘for fear you shd be absent from home’.41 It was clear that Darwin had successfully avoided the Captain, and thereby was not in danger of confronting FitzRoy’s view that his account of the voyage paid insufficient tribute to his debts to the Captain and other officers of the Beagle in helping him amass his collection of specimens. Nearly a year later, Darwin was writing to FitzRoy and attributing his failure to meet to illness – ‘for I do not go to the west end of town more than once a week, and I believe I have only seen Hyde Park once during the last two months . . . My stomach as usual has been my enemy.’42 It was joyous news when FitzRoy (himself now a married man, since 1836) decided to move out of town, though Darwin thought ‘how very inconvenient you must find it, living at so great a distance as 20 miles from your weekly journey’s end . . . for my own part . . . I do not think I shall ever venture out even as far as a suburban cottage’.43

  Within only a short time in Bloomsbury, Darwin, whose youth had been entirely rural, felt rooted in the protection of urban solitude. ‘You enquire about my taste for the country,’ he told his sister Caroline, ‘– my last visit I consider a very fortunate one – it has cured me of much sentiment & silliness – in fact I hate the thought of the country – the ennui & rain of Maer has effected a thorough cure. I shudder when I think of a damp, dull green view: London is so cheerful; thank goodness we shall not leave it for 6 months.’44

  That year, 1839, as well as being the year of his marriage, and the year when his first son was born – William Erasmus Darwin, on 27 December, just eleven months after the wedding – was also when Darwin came before the public as a man of science. The scientific world had been aware of his work ever since he had begun, from the Beagle, to send back reports to Henslow, Fox, Lyell and others, to dispatch palaeontological and geological specimens and to contribute, as one of Lyell’s most loyal supporters, to the current state of geological knowledge. It was in May–June 1839 that he came before the reading public as the author of his Journal of Researches. He did not come forward alone. Captain King, who had commanded HMS Adventure, surveying the coasts of South America from 1826 onwards, and who had been in overall command of the first expedition, before FitzRoy took command of the Beagle, and Captain FitzRoy himself, contributed two volumes, and Darwin one volume. The navy were not risking a repetition of the publishing fiasco in which both Captain Cook’s two completed voyages were written up by other hands before he had found his way into print. As the Quarterly reviewer of the three-volume set remarked, ‘Self-immolation is a term which we have more than once heard applied to the course pursued by those officers of the British navy who have given themselves up to nautical surveying and discovery.’45 While FitzRoy had been appalled by reading Philos’s first version of his Journal, the reviewer noted that ‘Mr Darwin . . . speaks in the most grateful terms of the treatment which he received throughout from Captain FitzRoy, who may well be satisfied with the results.’46 The Athenaeum complained that there was something unsatisfying about reading three separate accounts. ‘They exhibit occasionally a want of unity and continuous interest.’ Nevertheless, it recognized that Darwin’s, of the three journals of the set, was the most interesting. It respected his ‘ardour and the readiness with which he converses with nature in every variety of situation’. It praised Darwin’s ‘vigour of mind’. At the same time, it detected two Darwins. On the one hand was the punctilious observer, the accumulator of impressions, the unforgettable word-painter, the great naturalist. On the other, there was Darwin the theorist. It took issue with his geological speculations.

  It is true that he intends to disclose his facts as well as his theoretical views, completely, in a series of works, one of which is now in the course of publication; but in the mean time, the journal which is the subject of our comments labours under this disadvantage, that, stripped of details, it exhibits a predominating spirit of bold generalization, of which the world, not without justice, is exceedingly distrustful.47

  This referred, not to Darwin’s thoughts on the origin of species, which he did not reveal in the Voyage journal, but to his theories about the origin of volcanoes. From the President of the Geological Society, William Henry Fitton, now a venerable figure in the field, Darwin had high praise. ‘Of much of its natural history, I cannot judge: – but your Geology seems to me to be excellent – & a great part of it new . . . What I like best – however – is the tone of kind & generous feeling that is visible in every part: so that one sees that it is the work of a plain English gentleman – travelling for information, and not for Effect.’48

  Though recognition from the British scientific establishment was of paramount importance in Darwin’s life, there was one figure in the world who mattered to him even more, and that was Alexander von Humboldt. Not only was the old man the most famous man of science in the world, he was a direct role model. His early work, like Darwin’s, had been in the sphere of geology, investigating the volcanic origin of basalt in the Rhine region – a journey he had made with George Forster, one of the naturalists who sailed in HMS Resolution with Captain Cook. Humboldt had then undertaken stupendous journeys in South America and published accounts of its natural history. His journey laid the foundations of modern geography and of meteorolo
gy. When he was later lured back to serve the Prussian government in what he considered to be the provincialism of Berlin, he had begun to work out the giant scientific fresco which he entitled Kosmos, a great vision of everything. It was not yet in print when Darwin’s Voyage journal was published, but versions of it had been given as lectures for the previous two decades. Its scope was intended to demonstrate the ‘unity amid the complexity of nature’.49

  To be the new Humboldt! That was Darwin’s ambition. That was what, potentially, was contained in the notebooks in which he was slowly and patiently testing Blyth’s transmutation theory. If the theory was true, then it would indeed explain the complexity and simplicity of nature. It was therefore with the greatest trepidation that Darwin sent a presentation copy of his book to Potsdam. Despite the expenditure of evening oil (or gas) learning German, he had not advanced sufficiently in the language to address the Master in his own tongue. In September, however, his wildest dreams came true and he received a very long letter, over 1,500 words, in French. Like the President of the Geological Society in London, Humboldt recognized Darwin’s originality, in botany, geology, meteorology. He reminded Darwin that he had been sailing and treading in the wake of ‘l’immortel Cook’. What progress in the sciences had been made since then! This was demonstrated, for Humboldt, by the vast superiority of Darwin’s journal to that of Reinhold Forster, the ship’s naturalist on HMS Resolution in 1772–5. Humboldt paid Darwin the compliment of disagreeing with some of his geological speculations: ‘Il me reste aussi bien des doutes sur le transport des bloc de nos plains baltiques sure les rideaux de glace!’50 (‘I still have doubts about blocks of our Baltic tides being transported on rafts of ice!’) In general, however, Humboldt’s letter was an enthusiastic endorsement, not just of a book but of a life. He said that he had come to the end of his career, rejoicing without any regret that he had given his life to science. He only wished that circumstances permitted him to converse in person with ‘Monsieur Charles Darwin’. ‘Vous êtes placé bien haut dans mon esprit . . . Vous avez une belle carrière a parcourrir [sic].’51 Even allowing for the fact that Humboldt had become an old (seventy-year-old) courtier who was used to larding his correspondence with compliments, and even recognizing that Humboldt was a gay man who found it thrilling to endorse a young man’s book, this was a stellar accolade.

  ‘Few things in my life have gratified me more than hearing of his approbation, although I have swallowed the dose quite readily as if it had been a little less strong: even a young author cannot gorge such a mouthful of flattery.’52

  The birth of his first son on 27 December 1839 coincided with, or provoked, more illness in Darwin. He had a headache every day for the first week of 1840.53 He told Lyell in February that he had been unable to work for nine weeks.54 He consulted his second cousin Dr Henry Holland three times during February and March. The symptoms, described by Maria Edgeworth in a letter to her half-sister, were totally debilitating: ‘His stomach rejects food continually, and the least agitation or excitation brings on the sickness directly so that he must be kept as quiet as it is possible and cannot see anybody.’55 He consulted another doctor in April – his own father in Shrewsbury. Robert Darwin, in passing, sent word to his daughter-in-law, who stayed behind in London, that she should continue breastfeeding William. The Doctor always weighed any member of the family visiting The Mount, and he feared that Darwin had lost ten pounds in the last year, eighteen pounds since his return from the voyage. He now weighed in at 148 pounds (10 stone 8 pounds). It would seem that Dr Darwin had limited sympathy with his son’s condition. On a later visit to The Mount, ‘I told him of my dreadful numbness in my finger ends, & all the sympathy I could get, was “yes, yes, exactly – tut-tut – neuralgic, exactly, yes, yes”.’56 Briskness, however, seemed to have its efficacy. Darwin reported to his wife in London, ‘I enjoy my visit & have been surprisingly well & have not been sick once.’57 As soon as he became reunited with Emma, he was able to provide his baby son with constant rivalry for her attention by trembling, shaking, feeling ‘numb’, vomiting or simply feeling ‘languid’. Emma noted that there is nothing that ‘marries one so completely as sickness’.58 It is impossible to tell whether she was simply unselfish or whether she actually derived some emotional satisfaction from being his everlasting nursemaid. ‘It is a great happiness to me when Charles is most unwell that he continues just as sociable as ever and is not like the rest of the Darwins who will not say how they really are, but he always tells me just how he feels and never wants to be alone but continues just as warmly affectionate as ever, so that I feel I am a comfort to him.’59

  The year 1840 was dominated by illness: so much so that they spent the whole of the summer at Maer, only returning to London in November. The Swiss geologist Louis Agassiz came to the Geological Society in that month. Two years older than Darwin, Agassiz had followed a parallel path, in so far as he was pre-eminent in the fields of geology, palaeobiology and biology. His groundbreaking work, appearing in parts from 1833 to 1843, was Recherches sur les poissons fossiles. He raised the number of named fossil fish to 1,700. His studies enormously enriched human knowledge of extinct life: they led inexorably, from 1836 onwards, to geological reflections; and inevitably, given his position as Professor of Natural History at the University of Neuchâtel (a chair he took when he was just twenty-five), his mind turned to the Swiss Alps and the movements and effects of glaciers. ‘Great sheets of ice, resembling those now existing in Greenland, once covered all the countries in which unstratified gravel (boulder drift) is found.’60

  English scientists were thrown into turmoil by Agassiz’s address to the Geological Society. Greenough, De la Beche, Whewell, Sedgwick, Hopkins and Murchison61 all rejected the glacier idea, though it was confirmed later in the century by the Scandinavian geologists Otto Torell and Gerard De Geer and by the Germans Albrecht Penck and Eduard Brückner. ‘By the 1880s decisive evidence was available for not just a single glaciation but repeated advances and retreats of the ice sheets, their borders mapped in detail by the terminal moraines of debris they left behind.’62 Old Buckland was an early, indeed almost an immediate, convert to Agassiz’s glacial theory. Lyell himself would come around to it. It now finds general acceptance among geologists.

  Darwin’s attitude to Agassiz was equivocal. He sent the Switzer his own paper on Glen Roy (‘I have lately enjoyed the pleasure of reading your work on glaciers, which has filled me with admiration’).63 To Lyell he admitted that Agassiz’s book on glaciers was ‘capital’, yet he stubbornly persisted in thinking the boulders on Glen Roy and Jura had been carried on floating ice by sea. As late as September 1843 he was telling Fox that he would like to revisit Scotland to find evidence of ‘roads’ carried by prehistoric seas.

  ‘My marine theory for these roads’ – originally Lyell’s theory, but Darwin now saw it as his own – ‘was for a time knocked on the head by Agassiz ice-work – but it is now reviving again . . . even Lyell for a time became a catastrophist . . .’64

  His other area of interest – the transmutation of species – continued as an almost secret preoccupation transcribed into notebooks. Whatever his motives were in cutting out the opening pages of his Notebook B, his rival in the field of transmutational theory, Edward Blyth, was conveniently removed from the scene. It is sometimes said that Blyth, having devised his theory of the origin of species in the Magazine of Natural History, did not really see its implications. His essays had specifically addressed natural selection, sexual suggestion, the role of hereditary variation as ingredients in artificial breeding, but he believed that macro-mutations would ‘very rarely, if ever, be perpetuated in a state of nature’.65 It is not true to say, then, that Blyth did not see the implications of his theory: he merely thought it was a theory which explained certain phenomena in nature, rather than explaining everything. Luckily for Darwin, Blyth’s small chemist’s shop in Tooting failed, and Blyth was obliged to take what employment he could find for his talents. In the previo
us few years he had submitted a number of papers to the Zoological Society which were printed in their Proceedings – on the osteology of the Great Auk, and on fifteen species of sheep, including the newly discovered Ovis poli from Pamir. He had also shown members of the Society drawings and specimens of the yak, the Kashmir stag and other Indian ruminants, such as the Himalayan ibex. All these papers, demonstrating his interest in the zoology of the subcontinent, made him the ideal curator of the Museum of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta, a post he took up in 1841.66

  Notebook D, the third in Darwin’s series of notebooks on transmutation, makes it clear that Darwin had met Blyth at the Zoological Society before he sailed to India. ‘Mr Blyth remarked the greater difference in the 4 Struthionidae, than in many large orders of birds. The Emu & Cassowary closest. Ostrich & Rhea closer (& two Rheas still closer). Mr Blyth asked whether structure of pelvis was not adaptive structure, like little wings of Auks which does not make that bird a penguin.’67 This shows that micro-evolution (the Galápagos finches identified by Gould, Blyth’s little wings of auks) was a phenomenon of which Blyth was speaking to scientific colleagues before he set sail. Darwin also noted that Blyth had seen that ‘only near species or varieties produce heterogeneous offsprings’.68

  It is of interest that Darwin was recording here, not merely the observations of Blyth, to whom he owed so much, but the answers to those observations made by Richard Owen. Although Darwin would later accuse Owen of being at one with those diehards who insisted upon the fixity of species, we find in this entry in Notebook D – the date is 1838, remember – ‘Owen says relation of Osteology of birds to Reptiles shown in osteology of young Ostrich.’69 In his paper ‘On the Anatomy of the Southern Apteryx (Apteryx Australis, Shaw)’ in the Transactions of the Zoological Society, Owen would publish his presentation of April 1838: ‘The close resemblance of the Bird to the Reptile in this skeleton is well-exemplified in the young Ostrich, in which even when half-grown the costal appendages of the cervical region of the vertebral column continue separate and moveable, as in the Crocodile.’70