Darwin's Ghosts

by Rebecca Stott

  The first edition of Zoonomia, or The Laws of Organic Life, 586 pages long and weighing four pounds, appeared in the bookshops of England in the early summer of 1794, a year after the revolutionaries had beheaded the French king and war had broken out between France and much of Europe. Though his enthusiastic followers would be eagerly watching for an advertisement from his publishers announcing a new volume of poetry, Erasmus had, they were surprised to find, published a specialist medical treatise, the fruit of a lifetime’s study and treatment of the human body, an attempt to “reduce the facts” to a “theory of diseases,” a classification of illness. The prose was bald and uncompromising. There were lists, charts, case studies, and classifications and absolutely no eroticized compound adjectives, rhymes, or poetic flights of fancy or comedy.

  But there was a hand grenade. Buried deep inside the immensely detailed case histories and notes about specialized medical treatment, in which Erasmus Darwin described the human body as no more than a complex bundle of fibers and nerves, and families as passing down patterns of experience from one generation to the next, sat a fifty-five-page chapter called “Generation.” Those fifty-five pages boiled down to one astonishing claim, the claim Erasmus had been avoiding uttering for twenty years: that species—the human species, indeed all living species—had descended from minute aquatic filaments swimming in a prehistoric sea. “Would it be too bold to imagine,” he wrote,

  that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!

  Despite the apparent tact in this sentence, and the fact that he had couched his most daring claim as a rhetorical question, Erasmus Darwin’s “Generation” chapter shot straight from the hip. Evolutionary speculation had finally risen from the footnote underground of his prose and into the main body of the work. The fifty-five pages did not apologize for themselves. Erasmus cited evidence to prove that species were mutable and had adapted to their environment: “Some birds have acquired harder beaks to crack nuts, as the parrot. Others have acquired beaks adapted to break the harder seeds, as sparrows. Others for the softer seeds of flowers, or the buds of trees, as the finches.… All which seem to have been gradually produced during many generations by the perpetual endeavour of the creatures to supply the want of food.”* He recognized fossil discoveries as ways of tracing descent; he described sexual selection; he suggested that man was an animal among animals and thus not uniquely possessed of a soul; and he made absolutely no attempt to square his theories with the Bible.

  Over the next few months Erasmus Darwin watched for reviews, looking out for the first signs of alarm and accusation.† In September 1794 the Monthly Magazine declared Zoonomia to be “one of the most important productions of the age”; but that came as no surprise, since the journal was radical and run by Joseph Johnson, Erasmus’s publisher. The reviewer simply ignored the controversial chapter and praised the rest of the book. All the subsequent reviews followed suit.

  Was Erasmus frustrated by the silence? It is impossible to know. He seems to have been living on tenterhooks. He was under surveillance; he knew that. Three years earlier, John Reeve, a judge in London, had set up the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property Against Republicans and Levellers, employing spies in every town who were instructed to watch local subversives. In March 1795, Erasmus complained to Richard Lovell Edgeworth, the politician, inventor, and fellow Lunar Society member, that there were spies in his street: “I have a profess’d spy shoulders us on the right, and another on the opposite side of the street, both attornies!” He was sure, he wrote, that both he and Wedgwood were on Reeve’s list: “And I hear every name supposed to think different from the minister is put in alphabetical order in Mr Reeve’s doomsday book, and that if the French should land these recorded gentlemen are to be all imprison’d to prevent them from committing crimes of a deeper dye. Poor Wedgwood told me he heard his name stood high on the list.” Joseph Johnson was also on that list; everyone Erasmus knew seemed to be thinking of emigrating. “America is the only place of safety,” he wrote to Edgeworth, keeping up the veneer of banter, “and what else does a man past 50 (I don’t mean you) want? Potatoes and milk—nothing else. These may be had in America, untax’d by Kings and Priests.” A single review might tip the balance. But the accusations still did not come. The conspiracy of silence held.

  It took a year. In 1795, a reviewer in the British Critic, a right-wing periodical formed in 1793 to guard against the spread of radical ideas, condemned Zoonomia as subversive and urged the public not to read it. The situation worsened. In October 1796, Erasmus received a polite letter from Thomas Brown, an eighteen-year-old law student from Edinburgh, expressing his surprise that “no one had yet answered” the claims of Zoonomia and declaring that he had determined to be the one to do so, in print. He sent Erasmus a rather alarmingly detailed manuscript a few months later; Erasmus, furious, wrote to him twice that winter to tell him his book was both “hard” and “impertinent.”

  Just as Erasmus thought he had disposed of Brown, in April 1798, George Canning, under secretary of state for foreign affairs, published a long satire of Erasmus’s materialist ideas (and his poetic style) called Loves of the Triangles in his journal the Anti-Jacobin or the Weekly Examiner, effectively calling Darwin a revolutionary sympathizer. Serial publication allowed Canning to prolong the attack through April and May. Then in May Brown published the 560 pages of Observations on the Zoonomia of Erasmus Darwin denouncing Darwin’s materialism, his evolutionary ideas, and his classification of diseases. By the end of the year, Erasmus had begun to appear in political cartoons as a subversive. Prison beckoned. In February 1799 his publisher, Joseph Johnson, who had been publishing seditious books for decades, was tried and imprisoned for six months, charged with being “a malicious, seditious, and ill-disposed person and being greatly disaffected to our said sovereign Lord the King.”

  In that burst of revolutionary idealism back in 1791, in his commitment to putting progress before his own reputation, Erasmus Darwin had resolved to publish his two most dangerous works before he died. He published only one of those two books. With his publisher in prison, certain that his own name had been put on a list of subversives, with his face and name beginning to appear in political cartoons, he seemed no longer in any great hurry to publish The Origin of Society in his lifetime. Perhaps he had lost the energy or resolve; perhaps he knew he was dying. He put the final touches to the poem and wrote the short preface in January 1802; he died four months later.

  When Joseph Johnson published the poem, honoring his friendship with the late good doctor but protective of his own safety after his time in prison, he changed its title to the less provocative The Temple of Nature, or The Origin of Society, a Poem with Philosophical Notes. These were Erasmus Darwin’s last bold words on the origin of species. There was a simpler, quieter beauty about the poetry; it lacked the overwrought, highly eroticized language of The Botanic Garden. The whole poem turns on a question, asked in the first two lines: How did life begin? How was it “kindled”?—a question asked of the Muse by a now-dead Derbyshire philosopher. Urania, Priestess of Nature and Muse of Astronomy, deep in the earth, deep in the Temple of Nature, gives her answer:

  Organic Life began beneath the waves …

  Hence without parent by spontaneous birth

  Rise the first specks of animated earth.

  First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,

  Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;

  These, as successive generations blo
om,

  New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;

  Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,

  And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.

  Canto 1, 295–302

  Under the lyrical soprano of the poem, the bass voice of Erasmus’s lengthy prose footnotes explains, glosses, extends, and makes connections, drawing out mystery after mystery, synthesizing, cross-referencing to his own earlier work, drawing on Egyptian, Roman, and Greek creation stories as if to say: These things have always been known, but they have been hidden or repressed. I have excavated them for you. The story he tells is a simple one with a happy ending, based in its essentials on Lucretius’ De rerum natura: the universe was formed by “chemic dissolution,” and as the earth’s surface changed over millions of years, organic life developed beneath the sea, adapting constantly to survive (“One great Slaughter-House the warring World”), budding and breeding, constantly improving, transmigrating and transmuting through unimaginable tracts of time:

  In countless swarms an insect-myriad moves

  From sea-fan gardens, and from coral groves;

  Leaves the cold caverns of the deep, and creeps

  On shelving shores, or climbs on rocky steeps.

  As in dry air the sea-born stranger roves,

  Each muscle quickens, and each sense improves;

  Cold gills aquatic form respiring lungs,

  And sounds aerial flow from slimy tongues.

  Canto 1, 327–34

  Shout round the globe, how Reproduction strives

  With vanquished Death—and Happiness survives;

  How Life increasing peoples every clime,

  And young renascent nature conquers Time.

  Canto 4, 451–54

  Every line of both the poetry and the footnotes in The Temple of Nature put forward the fullest version of Erasmus’s evolutionary hypothesis, developed and modified over twenty-five years.

  Erasmus Darwin had a sophisticated understanding of how species had evolved from a single-celled aquatic ancestor, and of how both rocks and species were the result of millions of years of adaptation; he also had some emerging sense of natural selection. But though he read widely and synthesized ideas across many different disciplines, he did not come to understand evolutionary processes through a detailed study of natural history. Instead, his evolution emerged from his medical knowledge. It was good knowledge, important knowledge, but it was not broad enough to enable him to plot and document natural selection in a way that would provide the all-important evidence to persuade enough people. Erasmus wanted to convince his readers that progress was nature’s way, and thus that reform was to be embraced, not feared. His nature, unlike his grandson’s, was a progressive one. It emerged in an age of reform.

  There was not a single good review. Horror, monstrosity, atheism, degradation, cried reviewer after reviewer. The liberal Monthly Review derided “the tendency of Doctor Darwin’s poetry to degrade the human species and exalt animals of an inferior nature.” The poem, he added, was “in no way adapted to improve either the judgement or the morals of his readers.” The reviewer in the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine warned its readers that the poem “teems” with heretical ideas; he was scandalized by the poem’s “total denial of any interference of a Deity.” The Critical Review attacked the poem for “trying to substitute the religion of nature for the religion of the Bible”; the Gentleman’s Magazine declared the poem “glaringly atheistical”; in America, Joseph Priestley wrote, “If there be any such thing as atheism, this is certainly it”; and the reviewer for the British Critic simply declared: “We are full of horror and will write no more.”

  The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, fascinated by Erasmus Darwin’s earlier works, was, he claimed, nauseated by The Temple of Nature. The idea of “Man’s having progressed from an Ouran Outang state,” he wrote to William Wordsworth, is “contrary to all History, to all Religion, nay, to all Possibility.” He preferred, he wrote, “the History I find in my Bible … that Man first appeared with all his faculties perfect and in full growth.” Can any believe, he wrote elsewhere, “that a male and female ounce [leopard] … would have produced, in course of generations, a cat, or a cat and a lion? This is Darwinizing with a vengeance.” Still, the poem found at least one admirer. In London the young radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had been expelled from Oxford in 1811 for publishing a tract called The Necessity for Atheism and who, estranged from his father, had lived a migrant life since then, ordered and read and reread every Erasmus Darwin volume he could get his hands on.

  There is no question that Erasmus Darwin was sure about his theory of the origin of species. The trouble was that, partly due to his own personality and taste, partly because he had stopped believing that any plainly argued theory of the earth might be believed or respected, and partly also because he knew that the consequences of such straight talking might be the loss of his practice and his position in his tight rural community that otherwise tolerated a great deal, he was never able to say any of this outright. So Dr. Darwin, a freethinking polymath ahead of his time, had disguised his infidel ideas in poetry, or buried them deep in footnotes or deep within a medical textbook. But though the poetry of Erasmus’s vision may have seemed dark, heretical, and nauseating to some, it excited others who, like Erasmus himself, saw in his vision of human mutability a giant pulling himself warily to his feet.

  It is June in the year 1816 and midnight in the Villa Diodati in Geneva. Three young English travelers, Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, and John Polidori, have come to visit Lord Byron. Because the weather is so cold and wet, they have been holed up in his villa by the lake, discussing philosophy for several days. Polidori suggests they all write ghost stories, but as they think of ghosts and monsters, the conversation roams wildly. Percy Shelley, aged twenty-two, not long out of Oxford, has been reading about microscopy, the solar system, magnetism, and electricity. He tells them of a discovery made by Dr. Darwin—how in a paste of flour and water you can make tiny organisms increase in number and size, even without air, and they will come back to life again when dried out. That is how life began, he tells them. Not with a garden in Eden, but with tiny organisms in a pond. Might it not be possible, he speculates, to find a way of harnessing the vital principle that drives the minute water creatures back into life from death?

  Mary Godwin, Shelley’s brilliant and intellectually voracious lover, the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, is interested in theories of life for different reasons. Only eighteen years old and unmarried, she has been pregnant almost continuously since she and Shelley became lovers when she was sixteen. After eloping in 1814 and traveling across Europe with barely any money, she lost her first child, a daughter, at only two weeks old in February 1815; the loss devastated her. “Find my baby dead,” she wrote. “A miserable day.” Pregnant again only eight weeks later, she gave birth to her second child, a boy, William, in January that year. She is already pregnant again.

  Mary—who became Mary Shelley on her marriage to Shelley later that year—described the late-night conversations at the Villa Diodati in her introduction to the revised single-volume edition of Frankenstein in 1831: “They talked of the experiments of Dr Darwin … who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case till by some extraordinary means it began to move with a voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.”

  The vermicelli is a misremembering on either her or Shelley’s part. Darwin had actually written “vorticellae” in his notes on spontaneous generation in The Temple of Nature. He was describing a microscopic aquatic filament found in lead gutters that when dried out shows no sign of life but “being put into water, in the space of half an hour a languid motion begins, the globule turns itself about, lengthens itself by degrees and assumes the form of
a lively maggot … swimming vigorously through the water in search of food.”

  Unable to sleep, her head full of these speculations about life, Mary Shelley dreamed of a “pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy half-viral motion.”

  Published in January 1818, Frankenstein became an instant bestseller. Now regarded as the origin of modern science fiction, it is the world’s most famous horror story. “It was on a dreary night of November,” Mary Shelley wrote, “that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.”

  It had been quickened by the evolutionary speculations of Erasmus Darwin.

  *Even the mourning seals Erasmus used on a letter sent in November 1770 made of black wax to mark his wife’s death contained the motto. He was not too self-conscious to use it even in late 1770.

  *It was perhaps here, too, that she comforted him after the death of his eldest son, William, who had succumbed to an infection contracted at the dissecting tables of Edinburgh.