by A. N. Wilson
Darwin wrote to Huxley:
I know well how intolerable is the bitterness of such grief. Yet believe me, that time & time alone, acts wonderfully. To this day, though so many years have passed away [since Annie’s death], I cannot think of one child without tears rising in my eyes; but the grief is become tenderer & I can even call up the smile of our lost darling, with something like pleasure.22
‘Children are one’s greatest happiness,’ he wrote to Asa Gray, ‘but often still a greater misery. A man of science ought to have none – perhaps not a wife; for then there would be nothing in this wide world worth caring for, and a man might (whether he could is another question) work away like a Trojan.’23
In this phase of life, when one anxiety or another about his family was never far absent, and when his own health was always precarious, he worked like a Trojan indeed. There was the everlasting need, occasioned by reviews and correspondence, to emend The Origin of Species. Murray wanted a third edition; work on this began in November 1860 and was completed by March 1861. There was work on Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, published in two substantial volumes in 1868 – in effect, an expansion of the first few chapters of The Origin, work which occupied him for most of the 1860s. And there was also his work on orchids. During the extended summer holidays of 1860, when he and Etty had both been ill, and when excitements and fears about the Oxford meeting of the BAAS threatened, the Darwins stayed in Hartfield, Sussex, where Emma’s sisters, Elizabeth Wedgwood and Charlotte Langton, had houses next to one another. Looking for native orchids in the boggy Sussex hollows, he began a special study of the sundew, Drosera rotundifolia, whose small, round, reddish leaves, covered in sticky hairs or tentacles, not unlike a sea anemone, flexed and bent to ensnare insects. In the course of that autumn, he wrote detailed, happy letters about them to Henslow, who responded with advice, and seeds and specimens, to help him with his labours. This was what Darwin did best, and which caused him most delight: close observation of natural history. Everything, of course, in the end, referred back, in his mind, to the Theory. That relentlessly logical figure later in the century, Sherlock Holmes, in the story called ‘The Naval Treaty’ expressed the belief that the gratuitous beauty of flowers argued for the existence of a beneficent Creator.24 Orchids were surely nature’s version of art for art’s sake. Not so, demonstrated Darwin. The apparently meaningless ridges and horns in the sundew and other orchids were weapons in the struggle for survival. It was only by the arrival of insects in their tentacles that these beautiful plants could cross-pollinate.
Sherlock Holmes would seem to be in tune with the facts of the case. Angiosperms (that is, flowering plants which produce seeds with a female reproductive organ, a carpel) provide one of the most devastating challenges to Darwin. Once again, as with the feather, as with the pentadactylic limb, the homologue appears, as it were ready formed, some 140 million years ago. From the original Bauplan,25 over 250,000 species have been evolved or adapted. There are no transitional forms in the fossil evidence. Michael J. Sanderson, in an article ‘Back to the Past: A New Take on the Timing of Flowering Plant Diversification’,26 reminds us that it is not simply the origin of angiosperms which poses an insoluble mystery. ‘A number of much more recent clades of angiosperms could be interpreted as mini-abominations: that is, they have poor fossil records at their base, novel innovations with unclear transitional forms among related taxa’ (my italics).
The correspondence with Henslow limited itself to natural history, and steered clear of theology, as the two men always, very wisely, had done. Their friendship was old, as Darwin fondly remembered. Henslow ‘was deeply religious’.27 As for Darwin’s theory, he respected the younger man’s point of view, but he regarded it as not proven. ‘God does not set the creation going like a clock, wound up to go by itself,’ he told his brother-in-law Leonard Jenyns.28 Then, at the age of only sixty-four, Henslow, who lived at Hitchin, suffered a stroke and it was obvious that he was close to death. Hooker and his wife (Henslow’s daughter) immediately made the journey from Kew. The elderly Sedgwick, by now frail, tottered over from Cambridge, arriving in time to whisper words of faith into Henslow’s ear, not knowing whether his friend heard them or not.
Hooker, knowing of Henslow’s special fondness for Darwin, told his friend of the crisis. He happened to know that, in the previous couple of weeks, Darwin had been up to London for a Philosophical Club dinner, and had made a rare speech at the Linnean Society. He had also entertained Mary Butler at Down House, one of his fellow patients from the Ilkley water cure, who made an unsuccessful attempt to demonstrate spirit-rapping and table-turning. Yet, when it came to attending the death-bed of his mentor, Darwin pleaded illness as an excuse to stay away. ‘[I]f Henslow . . . would really like to see me, I would of course start at once,’ he wrote to Hooker. His sole reason for not offering to come,
was that the journey, with the agitation, would cause me probably to arrive utterly prostrated. I shd be certain to have severe vomiting afterwards, but that would not much signify, but I doubt whether I could stand the agitation at the time. I never felt my weakness a greater evil. I have just had a specimen, for I spoke a few minutes at Linnean Society on Thursday & though extra well it brought on 24 hours vomiting. I suppose there is some Inn at which I could stay, for I shd not like to be in the house (even if you could hold me) as my retching is apt to be extremely loud.29
The journey from King’s Cross station in London to Hitchin takes approximately half an hour. Darwin could easily have undertaken the journey within a day from Down, allowing himself time to make loud retching noises in wayside inns and railway lavatories. After Henslow had died, Darwin felt eaten up with guilt. Unable to speak to him about this, Emma wrote him a letter, urging him to pray.
When I see your patience, deep compassion for others, self command & above all gratitude for the smallest thing done to help you I cannot help longing that these precious feelings should be offered to heaven for the sake of your daily happiness. But I find it difficult enough in my own case. I often think of the words, ‘Thou shalt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee’.30
Darwin wrote ‘God bless you’ in the margin of this letter, but he had long ago left religious belief behind. When, years later, in 1871, Etty married Richard Litchfield, Darwin’s letter of advice and blessing contained the sentences, ‘I have had . . . a happy life, notwithstanding my stomach; and this I owe entirely to our dear old mother, who, as you know well, is as good as twice refined gold. Keep her as an example before your eyes, and then in future years, Litchfield will worship and not only love you, as I worship our dear old mother.’31
Some readers of such words, aware that Emma was not Darwin’s dear old mother, would find it hard not to see a direct correlation between the motherless Darwin’s need for his lost mother’s love and Emma’s constant willingness to pander to his psychosomatic whims. It is interesting that in her letter to him suggesting prayer she treasured his slavish gratitude to her.
Or was there a simple physical explanation? We have already dismissed (see Chapter 6) the possibility of Darwin having contracted Chagas’s disease in South America. A more convincing explanation was offered by Anthony K. Campbell and Stephanie B. Matthews, who argued in a 2005 paper, ‘Darwin’s Illness Revealed’, that Darwin suffered from systemic lactose intolerance.32 The symptoms of this condition fit Darwin’s case. He seems to have suffered his worst bouts of flatulence and vomiting about two hours after eating. This is the time it takes for lactose to reach the large intestine. Dr Gully’s regime included the removal of lactose from the diet, and the time Darwin underwent the water cure seems to be the only time he was free of his symptoms. Emma’s recipe book, preserved in the University Library at Cambridge, reveals Darwin’s sweet tooth and love of rich food, especially for creamy puddings. As well as puddings made of egg yolks and cream, Darwin, when ill, frequently took to his bed with bread and milk, the last thing he should have been doing if Camp
bell and Matthews are right in their diagnosis. Theirs certainly seems to be the sanest explanation yet for Darwin’s symptoms, but it also remains true that there was a psychosomatic element to the condition. Symptoms became much worse when Darwin was under stress, or when he was in danger of having to break his self-absorbed and highly domestic routines.
The death of Henslow removed a father-figure, whom Darwin had revered. ‘Poor dear & honoured Henslow. He truly is a model to keep always before one’s eyes . . . I fully believe a better man than Henslow never walked this earth.’33 So Darwin to Hooker. It probably made it more painful to contemplate Henslow’s virtue – and Emma’s virtue – during the 1860s when he cogitated the next big step, his book on The Descent of Man. Henslow, who never doubted so much as one of the Thirty-Nine Articles, and Emma, who urged Darwin to pray his way through his troubles, could scarcely endorse the views of humanity which he entertained: views which he had kept secret, but which he was now preparing to share with the world. In addition to this, he was revising and revising The Origin of Species, as the corrections and criticisms of the early version continued to cascade on to his desk at Down House. No wonder that the early 1860s corresponded to his worst yet spells of ill health. In September 1863, Emma persuaded him to return to Dr Gully’s clinic in Malvern. They took the Villa Nuova in Malvern Wells and Darwin attended the clinic as an outpatient. Dr Gully was ill and unable to supervise Darwin’s treatment. Dr James Ayerst was put in charge of the case and Darwin had no confidence in him. By now, Darwin’s skin was so raw with eczema that he could scarcely endure the rubbing and slapping and sousing which the ‘cure’ entailed. He was suffering memory loss – a fact about which Emma was in denial, but it was noted by Etty.34 He seemed to be on the verge of seizure, perhaps epilepsy. An especially painful aspect of the Malvern visit was that they at first supposed that Annie’s gravestone had been moved or stolen. Darwin wrote to his cousin William Fox:
Emma went yesterday to the church-yard and found the gravestone of our poor child gone. The Sexton declared he remembered it, & searched well for it & came to the conclusion that it has disappeared. He says the churchyard, a few years ago, was much altered, & we suppose that the stone was then stolen. Now, some years ago, you with your usual kindness visited the grave & sent us an account. Can you tell us what year this was? I was so ill at the time & Emma hourly expecting her confinement that I went home & did not see the grave. It is not likely, but will you tell us what you can remember about the kind of stone & where it stood; I think you said there was a little tree planted. We want, of course, to put another stone. I know your great & true kindness will forgive this trouble.35
In fact, the gravestone was merely hidden by some undergrowth and Emma eventually found it. While they were in Malvern, the Darwins heard from Hooker that he had lost his six-year-old daughter. It was a painful example of how frequent child-death was in Victorian England.
Darwin returned from Malvern iller than when he had arrived. He could now scarcely walk. From now onwards, he moved quite surely from being a middle-aged man, who was occasionally struck down by his mysterious symptoms, into being an old man, a full-time invalid, much of the time bed-bound.
‘For 25 years’, he wrote in 1865, supplying notes to yet another medic, Dr John Chapman, ‘extreme spasmodic daily & nightly flatulence; occasional vomiting, on two occasions prolonged during months . . . All fatigue, especially rocking [he means the rocking of a carriage or a railway] brings on the head symptoms . . . cannot walk above ½ mile – always tired – conversation or excitement tires me most.’36
The whiskers, which had been sprouting from English male cheeks since the 1840s, crept round during the Crimean War (1854–6) to cover the chin. The difficulty of obtaining shaving soap and razors – and the even greater difficulty of shaving in the wintry blizzards above Sevastopol – led to a relaxation of military discipline. Before the war, to be fully bearded in England implied that you were either an eccentric sage like Thomas Carlyle or a working-class labourer (also like Carlyle), or deranged. After the war, a full beard was a sign of being a war hero. Huxley, who had been smooth of chin during the Oxford debate with clean-shaven Bishop Wilberforce, by 1863 had a throat which was as furry as an orang-outang, and he continued to grow his beard until it reached his chest. So did Anthony Trollope. Alfred Russel Wallace returned from Singapore thickly bearded. Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate, Sir Henry Cole, the mind behind the Great Exhibition of 1851, John Ruskin, the future Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, they all sprouted long beards, so Darwin’s trademark Father Christmas growth was nothing unusual. What was unusual, however, as his white beard lengthened over his coverlets, was how old, how very old, he now appeared to be. From the age of fifty onwards, he had become an ancient, resembling the wounded king Amfortas in the Parsifal legend – which Richard Wagner sketched out in April 1857, though he would not write the music drama until the late 1870s, early 1880s. Without suggesting that Huxley and friends were the Grail Knights, there was something of the mythic, or allegorical, about Darwin’s hermit-existence from now onwards. He had started the nineteenth century on an imaginative journey for which a dreadful price seemed to be being paid.
‘I suppose your destiny is to let your Brain destroy your Body,’ his cousin Fox told him.37 From Darwin’s point of view, work was the only thing which made him forget his pain. Yet, by paradox, ‘I know well that my head would have failed years ago, had not my stomach always saved me from a minute’s over work.’38 Francis Darwin would look back and remember his father’s inability to sleep once he was fired up by an intellectual problem, or disturbed by churning emotions. (He once woke up his son William in the small hours to apologize for a remark he had made the previous day, and which his mind, in the watches of the night, had magnified out of all proportion.)
The illness now dominated. When Hooker questioned his claim that he had vomited dozens of times during a day, and asked, ‘Do you actually throw up or is it retching?’, Darwin admitted that ‘I seldom throw up food, only acid & morbid secretion.’39
Perhaps the simplest way of living with the condition was to accept that the Darwins and the Wedgwoods, multiply intermarried cousins, were a hypersensitive tribe, much given to nervous disorder. It was a question of heredity: like everything else apparently.
14
Adios, Theory
IN 1856, WHILE Darwin had still been at work on The Origin of Species, a jolly, cigar-smoking Augustinian friar, Gregor Mendel, began a series of experiments in the garden of St Thomas in Brno – in what is now the Czech Republic, but was Brünn in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Mendel deliberately kept his experiment very simple. He worked on the ordinary garden pea. It was ideally suited for the study of the problem of inheritance, since it is short lived and could be rapidly studied through several generations. Also, it might be either self-fertilized or cross-fertilized, so each mating could be controlled.
Mendel crossed yellow-seeded peas with green-seeded. The hybrid seeds were all yellow, so he named the yellow-seeded character the dominant and the green-seeded the recessive. He allowed 258 of the yellow-seeded hybrids to seed themselves, thereby obtaining 8,023 seeds, of which 6,022 were yellow and 2,001 were green. So there was a three to one proportion for every pair of characters involving a dominant and a recessive. The recessive trait-determiner – what the world now knows as the gene – re-expressed itself in the second hybrid generation whenever it was by chance combined with another recessive. Mendel had discovered the modern science of genetics.
His experiments with the peas allowed him to draw two conclusions. The first principle was the law of segregation. Genes come in alternative varieties known as alleles which influence phenotypes – such things as the shape of a seed if you are a pea, or the colour of your eyes if you are a human being. Two alleles are inherited, one from each parent. If different alleles are inherited, one is dominant and the other is recessive. The recessive gene can be passed on (as Queen Victoria passed on haemophilia) withou
t the carrier having any of its characteristics.
Mendel’s second principle was the law of independent assortment. The inheritance pattern of one trait does not influence the inheritance pattern of another trait. So the genes that encode the shape of a pea’s seed do not encode its colour. Each Mendelian trait is passed on in the ratio of three to one, according to the dominance of the pattern of the genes involved.
These laws of Mendel were both, in fact, slightly inaccurate. Not all characteristics follow the simple patterns of dominance which he suggested. Only after the structure of DNA was discovered in the 1950s could the full science of genetics be developed. Mendel, however, had made a discovery of a truly Newtonian or Copernican dimension. Up to this point, the study of inheritance, and the mystery of how characteristics are passed on through the generations, was shrouded in muddled theories. Mendel moved out of theory into something which could be demonstrated, over and over again. All that was required, after Mendel, was for his discoveries to be refined. He read his paper on inheritance to the Natural History Society of Brno. In 1868, he was elected abbot of his monastery and gave up scientific research. He died in 1884. The organist at his funeral was the young Janáček.
Mendel’s paper about the peas lay unremarked until, in and around 1900, various scientists, including Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns and Erich von Tschermak, who were working on what could be learnt about the mechanism of evolution by hybridization, rediscovered him and recognized his importance. William Bateson, in Cambridge (England), an evolutionary biologist, immediately saw the importance of Mendel’s work and coined the term ‘genetics’. Not long afterwards two American scientists – Edmund Beecher Wilson at Columbia University and Nettie M. Stevens at Bryn Mawr – concluded, independently, that the determination of sex, including the one-to-one sex ratio, was caused in Mendelian fashion by the segregation and reunion of the X and Y chromosomes.