If he could not run the risk of publishing his ideas in direct prose, he told Cradock, he would write poetry instead. “I lately interceded with a Derbyshire lady to desist from lopping a grove of trees, which has occasioned me … to try again the long-neglected art of verse-making, which I shall inclose [sic] to amuse you, promising, at the same time, never to write another verse as long as I live, but to apply my time to finishing a work on some branches of medicine, which I intend for a posthumous publication.”
Erasmus had not given up on Zoonomia, but he could see no way of publishing it before he died. An optimistic man who believed passionately in progress, perhaps he hoped that if he waited long enough the scientific world might become more tolerant. He resolved to bide his time.
Meanwhile in 1775 he was falling in love with a beautiful married woman, Elizabeth Pole, a neighbor and patient, the Derbyshire lady of the poem. Married to a retired military man, she was raising her children in a large country house four miles east of Derby. Mrs. Pole shared his interest in botany, in gardens, and in the raising and education of children. Erasmus sent her unsigned love poems, expressing his feelings indirectly, playfully, under cover of classical myth and allusion, even disguising himself as a wood nymph.
In 1776 Erasmus bought a few acres of mossy land in a valley a mile from his house in order to turn it into an experimental garden—“tangled and sequestered,” as his friend the poet Anna Seward, daughter of Canon Seward, described it. Wet with springs and lined with rare aquatic plants, it was also the site of an old bathhouse. He employed local men to widen the brook into small lakes and “taught it to wind between shrubby margins.” He planted a variety of trees and plants, “uniting the Linnaean science with the charm of landscape.” Perhaps in this charmingly entangled bank full of drosera and bog plants and insects he and Mrs. Pole could meet without exciting gossip.* It was also here that he began to think about putting his heretical ideas about sex, nature, and the origins of life into poetry. “The Linnaean system,” he told Anna Seward that year, referring to the new system of plant classification introduced by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, “is unexplored poetic ground, and a happy subject for the muse. It affords fine scope for poetic landscape; it suggests metamorphoses of the Ovidian kind, though reversed. Ovid made men and women into flowers, plants, and trees. You should make flowers, plants, and trees into men and women. I will write the notes, which must be scientific, and you shall write the verse.” It would be a way of popularizing botany and promoting Linnaeus’s ideas about plant sentience and sexuality. But, Anna replied, it would not be proper for a female poet to write about botany and plants’ sexual parts. Erasmus must write the work himself.
Each project perpetually branched into others in Erasmus’s writing life. He tried to find ways of holding it all together, refusing to compartmentalize his ideas, understanding the ways in which they were interdependent. Soon after he discussed the botanical Linnaean poem with Anna Seward in 1779, he began writing it, trying to put the scientific prose notes together at the same time as the poetry, but there were obstacles to overcome. When he failed to find an English translation of Linnaeus, he formed the Lichfield Botanical Society in the hope of getting some translations commissioned, and when the contributors failed to produce anything very useful, he began translating Linnaeus’s Latin phrases into English himself. Although the translation work was laborious and slow, he found it counterpointed and complemented the poetry in surprising ways.
For four years Erasmus slipped between the two manuscripts piled on his desk, the embryonic poem now called The Loves of the Plants and its prose notes and the translation project, describing plant couplings and birthings, coining new words to describe the sexual parts of plants (bristle-pointed, end-hollowed, scollop’d, thread-formed, lance-prickled, vein-hollowed), amusing himself with shaping elaborate sexual innuendoes and courting Mrs. Pole. Zoonomia, direct, claim-making, plainspeaking, heretical Zoonomia, would have to wait in the wings a little longer. It was still not the time to publish controversial books. France had signed a treaty with America against Britain. In June 1779, Spain, supported by the French, declared war.
In matters of philosophy and science, Erasmus Darwin was a Francophile. In the late eighteenth century, as relations between Britain and France deteriorated, the British grew first scornful and then afraid of all things French. France represented everything Catholic, autocratic, and volatile. French natural philosophers, their British counterparts would say, wrote speculative science with grand theories; they built beautifully crafted castles in the air, in the manner of the Comte de Buffon. The British, by contrast, excelled by using plain facts. Erasmus, a grand-theory man and a Buffon enthusiast, must have felt that philosophical conservatism keenly.
When John Whitehurst finally published his revealingly entitled Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth; Deduced from Facts and the Laws of Nature in 1778, it was a mass of contradictions. Though the evidence in the rocks and shells he had studied and collected for twenty years all seemed to undermine both the creation story and the Flood, he had worked hard to force a square peg into a round hole, to reconcile his science with the Bible. In the end he simply divided his book in half, starting with a long attempt to resolve his findings with the biblical account and putting all the facts he had collected over twenty years into an appendix that seemed to say something quite different. He was a practicing Christian, more observant than the other Lunar men, but the contradictions in his book were probably as much the result of an attempt to distance himself from French theorizing as the result of a struggle with his own belief.
Josiah Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin were astonished at how straitlaced Whitehurst’s book had become in comparison to the earlier drafts they had seen. Wedgwood complained to Thomas Bentley, his partner in the porcelain factory, that Whitehurst’s “manuscript has undergone as many alterations since its first formation … as his world has suffer’d by earthquakes, & inundations.… I own myself astonish’d beyond measure at the labour’d & repeated efforts to bring in & justify the mosaic account beyond all rhime [sic] or reason.” “I should like to tumble a little of his world about his ears,” he continued in another letter, “but I shall forbear, for I love the man.” Was Whitehurst struggling with his religious beliefs, or had he simply decided to play it safe? After all, he had a business to run. He could afford neither to alienate himself from the scientific or industrial communities in Derbyshire or London nor to be ostracized as an unbeliever.
When Elizabeth Pole’s husband died, on November 29, 1780, leaving her a rich widow, it was Erasmus Darwin she married four months later rather than any of her younger suitors. They already had eight children between them from their previous relationships; they would have another six of their own over the next eight years, the first born in January 1782. Erasmus’s new wife shared his interest in science. In the summer of 1782 he took Elizabeth and her daughters on a geological expedition up into the peaks around Derby to show them first the copper mine at Acton and then Thor’s Cave. He was still thinking through his earlier ideas about life having emerged from aquatic filaments nourished in underground caves and great subterraneous lakes.
Although The Loves of the Plants was quickly taking shape, Erasmus was deeply ambivalent about becoming a published poet. It was one thing to play about with private love poems, but going public with a poem about the sexual lives of plants, a poem freighted with scientific material, some of it controversial, was something else. On the one hand, he told Elizabeth, a published poem might bring them much-needed extra income—his friend Anna Seward was making a good deal from her poetry now; on the other hand, it would put him at the mercy of scornful reviewers. He would seek opinions, he assured her. In the spring of 1784 he sent the manuscript to Joseph Johnson, a radical publisher in London, explaining, “I would not have my name affix’d to the work on any account, as I think it would be injurious to me in my medical practice, as it has been to all other physicians w
ho have published poetry.”
As he prepared The Loves of the Plants for anonymous publication, Erasmus began a new long poem called The Economy of Vegetation, which he had decided to publish paired with The Loves of the Plants, as two volumes called The Botanical Garden. He was now writing poetry at an extraordinary pace in any spare time that opened up: indoors on a writing board supported by a cushion, taking refuge from the children in the summerhouse or on the road in his carriage. The young daughter of one of his patients observed the famous doctor climbing out of his mud-splattered carriage around this time. He was, she remembered,
vast and massive, his head almost buried in his shoulders, and he wore a scratch-wig, as it was then called, tied up in a little bob-tail behind. A habit of stammering made the closest attention necessary, in order to understand what he said. Meanwhile, amidst all this, the Doctor’s eye was deeply sagacious, the most so I think of any eye I remember to have seen; and I can conceive that no patient consulted who was not inspired with confidence on beholding him; his observation was most keen; he constantly detected disease, from his observation of symptoms so slight as to be unobserved by other doctors.
James Hutton’s long-awaited Theory of the Earth came out in 1788; Erasmus devoured it, admiring Hutton’s bold account of a regulated earth cycling on through time and space, continents shifting and remaking themselves infinitely slowly, with “no vestige of a beginning and no sign of an end.” The earth increasingly seemed to Erasmus, too, to have its own internal economy, rhythms and cyclings replicated by the human bodies he tended and nursed every day. Hutton’s book confirmed him in his view that his several unfinished manuscripts were all in dialogue with one another, all part of the same investigation of nature’s very simple but elusive laws. Inspired by Hutton’s book, Erasmus worked hard to extend his geological knowledge and began to put together an ambitious fossil collection.
The Loves of the Plants was finally published in 1789, just as the Revolution broke out in France and in the same month that Elizabeth gave birth to their sixth baby. The critical response to the poem was rapturous. This was his attempt, Erasmus explained in the introduction, “to enlist imagination under the banner of science” and to interest readers in botany. The book was well suited to the atmosphere of 1789—it sketched a Rabelaisian vision of a world in a state of progressive change, but it did so tentatively. “Perhaps all the products of nature are in their progress to greater perfection?” Erasmus wrote, attaching a question mark and a “perhaps” to soften it and then tucking the idea deep into a footnote, where it might escape notice.
Erasmus buried scientific speculation in his footnotes. Perhaps he thought an enlightened reader would dig these thoughts out, someone who knew what to look for. His friend the fellow Lunar Society member and industrial chemist James Keir noticed. “You are such an infidel in religion that you cannot believe in transubstantiation,” he wrote, teasing Erasmus about the materialism of the poem, “yet you can believe that apples and pears, hay and oats, bread and wine, sugar, oil, and vinegar are nothing but water and charcoal, and that it is a great improvement in language to call all these things by one word, oxyde hydro-carbonneux.” It was an astute comment. What Keir saw was that Erasmus Darwin was replacing the mystery of the Catholic belief in transubstantiation (the bread being transformed into Christ’s body in the sacrament, the wine into his blood) with his own materialist chemical transubstantiation. It was a dangerous kind of heresy, but so disguised as to have gone almost unnoticed.
In January 1790, six months after the storming of the Bastille, three months after seven thousand women had marched on Versailles, two months after the National Assembly had declared all Church lands and buildings in France the property of the people, Erasmus Darwin resolved to publish Zoonomia. He wrote to fellow Lunar Society member James Watt, making light of his decision: “I have some medico-philosophical works in MS which I think to print sometime, but fear they may engage me in controversy (which I should not much mind) and that they will not pay so well (which I mind more).”
It was a dangerous time, certainly, but for many radically minded deistic or atheist intellectuals in the later eighteenth century it was also a hopeful time. The French Revolution proved that reform was possible, that tyrannies might fall, that human societies might evolve toward democratic or republican systems. As William Wordsworth famously wrote, recalling the atmosphere in Paris during the early days of the Revolution some years afterward, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very Heaven!” (The Prelude, X, 690–94). For reformists in England it now seemed possible to speak, to take risks. More important, it perhaps seemed imperative to do so. It was time to take a stand for reform alongside other liberals, dissenters, and radicals. “I know you will rejoice with me,” Wedgwood wrote, describing the events in France as “a glorious revolution.” Erasmus, determined to make his own stand, inserted a long celebration of the Revolution into The Botanic Garden. He portrayed the French people rising up like the giant Gulliver from the repressions of “Confessors and Kings” and Liberty as volcanic lava that, erupting, would form newly fertile landscapes.
But as the French Revolution shifted into a more violent phase over the following year, opinion in Britain turned against dissenters. Erasmus’s friend the chemist and dissenting priest Joseph Priestley, one of the Lunar Men, continued to be among the most outspoken supporters of liberal reform, dubbed the “arch-priest of Pandaemonium liberty” by the Gentleman’s Magazine. In 1790 his house was attacked. Priestley continued to give libertarian speeches, stressing that the reformers must hold their nerve and bear persecution, for “the world may bear down on particular men, but they cannot bear down a good cause.” A Birmingham dinner arranged to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille provoked a riot; the rioters marched on Priestley’s New Meeting House and his Old Meeting House, destroying all the books in the library and torching the building, then marched on Priestley’s house, where they burned all the furniture and books and manuscripts in the library, destroyed all the instruments in his laboratory, and razed the house. Priestley and his wife managed to escape to London. Over the following week the rioters and looters, daubing their slogans of “Church and King for ever” on walls and shutters, encouraged by Anglican clergy, local landlords, and even a justice of the peace, attacked four meeting houses and twenty-seven residences before dragoons were brought in from Nottingham to make arrests. Erasmus declared the Birmingham riots “a disgrace to mankind.”
This was a riot against philosophers and science. The rioters had been persuaded that philosophes like Voltaire and Rousseau had been responsible for starting the revolution in France and that such men must be silenced in Britain if a similar revolution was to be prevented. One witness remembered that “the highroads for full half a mile of the house were strewn with books and that on entering the library there was not a dozen volumes on the shelves, while the floor was covered several inches deep with the torn manuscripts.”
The Economy of Vegetation, one of the two volumes that made up Erasmus’s poem The Botanical Garden, with its 2,440 lines of verse and 80,000 words of scientific notes, was a series of speculative essays in verse on geology, the economy of nature, and the atmosphere as well as a celebration of the French Revolution. It came out in June 1792, only a year after the Birmingham riots, and only three months before the September massacres began in Paris, in which thousands of aristocrats and priests were hunted down, imprisoned, and executed on the guillotine. The French would call it the Terror. No one had yet smashed the windows of Erasmus’s Derbyshire house. His new poem was admired in literary circles for its originality, inventiveness, and range, and it became one of the most widely read books of the season, taking its place on bookshelves alongside Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women and Tom Paine’s Rights of Man.
With each new month of patriotic bombast and antiliberal rhetoric from the press and the failure of liberal ideals in France as the Revolut
ion entered its most violent stage, Erasmus strengthened his resolve to publish both Zoonomia and the increasingly materialist new poem-in-the-making The Temple of Nature in his lifetime. “I am now too old and harden’d to fear a little abuse,” he protested. Publishing the two books would be his greatest risk yet. Both manuscripts, in prose and poetry, contained undisguised evolutionary speculation. Erasmus added more scraps and ideas and evidence and case studies to them daily, through 1793 and 1794, and edited pages of others. In May 1794, twelve reformers were arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London and brought to trial one by one. The government declared habeas corpus suspended for eight months. In October 1794, William Godwin wrote: “This is the most important crisis in the history of British liberty that the world ever saw.”
Thus far Erasmus had escaped censure by dressing his reform-centered radical ideas in classical garb or disguising them as burlesque or masking them as mock heroic verses inspired by the work of Alexander Pope. But he was tiring of disguises. The gamble he played was whether he could reach enough people, make some money for his family, propagate his ideas, and die before anyone put him on trial. And if they did, what charges would stick with the material he had written so far? I was writing about plants, my lord. Trying to bring botany to the people.
But with something of a witch hunt sweeping the country, by 1794 Erasmus was no longer getting away with it. In late 1794 an anonymous author wrote a parody of The Botanic Garden called The Golden Age written as a letter by Erasmus himself to the reforming physician Thomas Beddoes, making the implied prorevolutionary sentiments of The Botanic Garden absolutely explicit. Erasmus was so troubled by the accusation that he put a notice in the Derby Mercury to deny that he had written it.
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