Darwin's Ghosts

by Rebecca Stott

  Most important of all, the author of Vestiges helped his readers at every turn to reconcile these new ideas with their belief in a Christian God. Vestiges was not an atheist book. Rather, the narrator insisted that all this extraordinary change and transformation was God’s work. God had created nature to do his work for him, to work through the laws that he had made. If Chambers had not presented transmutation as driven in some vague way by divine law, Vestiges would never have found its way into Buckingham Palace or into as many libraries and living rooms as it did. It enabled his readers to come to terms with the new science, but though it retained the place of God in the universe, it also needed them to accept that though God had set the earth and its laws spinning, he did not intervene.

  Many embraced this new, more optimistic portrayal of nature’s processes with enthusiasm. Alfred Tennyson, whose closest friend, the talented poet and intellectual Arthur Hallam, had died from a stroke at the age of twenty-two leaving him, after reading Lyell’s Principles, doubly despairing about the seeming indifference of nature. He had described nature in his famous elegy to Hallam, In Memoriam, as no longer a benevolent and tender mother, but one who abandoned her offspring, left them to fend for themselves, allowed whole species to die out; not only was nature “red in tooth and claw,” he concluded, but “Time a maniac flinging dust” and “Life, a Fury slinging flame.” Man, too, would go the way of the dinosaurs, “blown about the desert dust / Or seal’d within the iron hills.”* Reading Vestiges provided Tennyson with a new confidence and optimism about nature’s ways and the future of mankind; he began a new romantic-comic narrative poem full of ideas of reform, “The Princess: A Medley” (1847), and added a new and optimistic ending to the still-evolving In Memoriam.

  The very first reviews of Vestiges showed no indication of the storm to come; the book was praised for its prose style and energy, and no mention was made of its more controversial ideas. The first of the religious monthlies and quarterlies predictably stressed the heretical nature of the idea of progressive development and warned its readers against it. But few of the prestigious quarterlies featured any reviews at all. There was an odd silence for several months. Potential reviewers and churchmen read the pages, shook their heads, and looked to the scientists and professors at Oxford and Cambridge to make a judgment, waiting for someone else to take the lead. By April 1845, Vestiges was in its fourth edition.

  The silence was broken first at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in May in Cambridge. Anne and Robert Chambers traveled there by train, nervous with anticipation, determined to watch and listen to what Chambers hoped would be a rallying of men of science around his controversial book. Instead, the couple watched the gathering of conservative men of science close ranks against it. The scientific community, enraged by an anonymous impostor using scientific papers to endorse an unproved and dangerous set of speculations, denounced the book not as blasphemy but as just bad science. Chambers and his wife heard the great astronomer John Herschel deliver a devastating attack on the book as they sat in the front row of a large crowd at Senate House.

  Until May 1845, the Oxford and Cambridge Anglican men of science could not decide whether this anonymously authored, metropolitan, unphilosophical book deserved the honor of being taken seriously. In November 1845, the liberal Tory diplomat and geologist George W. Featherstonhaugh wrote to the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, Woodwardian professor of geology, vice-master of Trinity College, and canon of Norwich Cathedral, warning him about the impact Vestiges was having in London. “I think you could smash him and I wish you would,” he wrote. “Already some consider this book as the signal of the Revolt against the Church.” But Sedgwick replied that though he hated the idea of such a book, he had no time, had not read it, and did not write for the quarterlies.

  It was March before Sedgwick read Vestiges and April before he made his outrage public, at a breakfast for clerics in the cathedral town of Ely, when he denounced the book as a work of “rank materialism” almost certainly written by a woman. Though the book undoubtedly had a “charm of manner & good dressing,” he wrote to Charles Lyell two days later, he was now determined to “strip off the outer covering and show its inner deformity and foulness.” Vestiges was, he wrote to Macvey Napier, a “rank pill of asafoetida and arsenic, covered with gold leaf.” He feared for its impact on young women in particular: “You have no conception what mischief the book has done & is doing among our London blues [bluestockings], & God willing I will strive to abate the evil.” He would, he promised Napier, stamp with an “iron heel upon the head of the filthy abortion, and put an end to its crawlings.”

  For the canon of Norwich Cathedral, the professor of geology, the vice-master of Trinity College, Vestiges was the whore of Babylon, a feathered and bejeweled crone, a snake, and a not-quite-dead abortion. He set to work on the book, taking his pencil to page after page in fury. His ferocious annotations survive him. Although his published review was more measured, his sense of moral apocalypse was barely modified. He warned his readers that Vestiges “comes before them with a bright, polished, and many-coloured surface, and the serpent coils of a false philosophy, and asks them to stretch out their hands and pluck forbidden fruit.” The review he began in May grew to be eighty-five pages before he had finally vented his spleen and his misogyny.

  Sedgwick was fighting a series of battles, not only against the spread of materialism and the increasing articulacy of atheists, but against the popularization of science, the rise of the nonspecialist man of science, Catholicism, the power of women, and the corrupting effect of urbanization on the intelligentsia. The result was venomous.

  Members of the editorial boards of the Christian journals sighed with relief. The Anglo-Catholic Christian Remembrancer praised Sedgwick’s “masterly essay” for placing the dangers of the development hypothesis “beyond all further controversy.” In Scotland, where the Scottish evangelical party had broken away from the Established Church of Scotland to form the Free Church, Vestiges was perceived to be an even greater threat to the authority of the Church. The split was seen as having weakened the Churches against the forces of secular liberalism. When Chambers published Vestiges in 1844, the Combes and their friends, reformist freethinkers in Edinburgh, felt themselves an increasingly beleaguered minority surrounded by evangelicals. “We seem to be standing on the verge of a vast volcano,” wrote one Scottish journalist in 1847, “ready to explode and overwhelm us with terrible destruction.” The Scottish Church called on fine writers such as the evangelical geologist Hugh Miller to refute Vestiges, to challenge the anonymous author on his own ground. In September 1845, Miller referred to Vestiges in the Witness as “one of the most insidious pieces of practical atheism that has appeared in Britain during the present century.” Not content with refuting the book in a review, he published a deeply hostile book, Foot-prints of the Creator, in 1849.

  Miller’s rhetoric was quite different from Sedgwick’s. He saw no whores of Babylon, no foul crones, no abortions to be stamped upon. Instead he saw swamps, infection, and sinking sands. He declared that “the lower levels of society had sunk into a miasmatic marsh out of which poor law assessment, fierce revolutionary outbreaks, plagues, and pestilence, threaten to arise and envelope in indiscriminate ruin the classes above.” The Church must make its most valiant attempts at “draining and purifying the bog.”

  Infidelity was the common enemy of all the churches of Scotland, high and low; they used a language of warfare to articulate their sense of being under siege. Vestiges, churchmen complained, had become a banner that the infidels rallied beneath; it had become their fiery cross. The Reverend Graham Mitchell dedicated a whole chapter to denouncing the book in his Young Man’s Guide Against Infidelity (1848); other pulpit refutations followed. The Reverend Dr. John Brown, in a keynote speech for the formation of the Scottish Association for Opposing Prevalent Errors, declared to the alarm of his audience: “Infidelity is of the spirit of the present and of the spiri
t of the future. It is coming in stronger and stronger.” And the Reverend Andrew Thompson declaimed, “Infidelity … like the spider, was hanging out its webs on many a beautiful tree of knowledge, and but all too often, alas! it succeeded in ensnaring the unwary passer by.”

  Vestiges raised hackles for decades, drawing the most aggressive rhetoric from otherwise restrained men. As late as 1854, when the tenth edition of the book was published, a decade after its first publication, Thomas Henry Huxley, who, though he would later become Darwin’s most outspoken and ardent supporter, was then a sworn enemy of transmutationism, wrote a review. He began with the lines from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, words uttered by Macbeth as Banquo’s ghost appears before him yet again: “Time was, that when the brains were out, the man would die.” Comparing the book to Banquo’s unsilenceable ghost was not quite the same as comparing it to a not-quite-dead abortion, but Huxley meant much the same thing: Why does the hand of transmutationism still rise from the lake we have tried to drown it in? Why will it not die?

  But Vestiges also inspired people, challenged them, enlarged their sense of the dimensions of the past and of the future, persuaded them that transmutation was possible, even probable, and that it need be neither godless nor dangerous to think so. In 1846 Florence Nightingale, then aged twenty-six and trying to educate herself in anatomy in preparation for a vocation in nursing, visited the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons with a friend. The two women stopped to admire the series of skeletons of flightless birds from New Zealand and took the time to trace out anatomical connections between the bone structures of the recently found fossil skeleton of the giant moa, an extinct bird bigger than the ostrich, and smaller living species. “The thing that was most curious of all,” she wrote to her cousin at school, “was to see how the species ran into one another, as Vestiges would have it.” In London, few people huffed and puffed like Sedgwick. Instead they were fascinated by the new understanding of time Vestiges had given them.

  With good manners and careful social strategies, Chambers remained unidentified. Through the 1840s he continued tending his still growing family and his printing presses, taking geological trips, and trying to establish himself as a serious writer on geology. It was not until November 1848, four years after Vestiges was published, that his reputation suffered a serious blow. And he himself might have admitted that it was due to a lapse of judgment on his part. He had allowed his name to go forward for the position of lord provost of Edinburgh, the city’s highest civic honor.

  Within a few days of the announcement, a long letter in the Witness in November 1848 expressed “grave objections” to his candidacy. “Every one knows,” the anonymous letter writer declared,

  that Mr Chambers studiously excludes all religious subjects and references from his periodicals; and that notwithstanding the vast multitude of papers of all kinds which he has written or published, it would be difficult to gather from any one of them that a God exists, or that a way of salvation from sin has been revealed. He is, indeed, the great representative of our non-religious periodical press. This is of itself seriously criminal. But he is charged with even worse than this. He is charged with writing and sending forth to the world a work which, not to speak of its false and superficial science, “expels the Almighty from the Universe” and renders “the revelation of His will an incredible superstition” (North British Review); which “tells us that our Bible is a fable, when it teaches us that man was made in the image of God” (Edinburgh Review). I do not say that Mr Chambers is the author of this revolting production; but he is alleged to be the author.

  Chambers, worried for the reputation of the publishing house and horrified at his continuing persecution by the Church, withdrew his candidacy in disgust.

  Charles Darwin, in his thirties with his theory of natural selection locked away in his study drawer, watched from the wings and bided his time. His own ideas about species would have to wait, he realized, if he was to avoid the opprobrium being meted out to the anonymous author of Vestiges. The book was lively enough, he noted to himself, but it was full of flaws. Only when there was a weight of evidence, only when there was a theory, a mechanism for how species have adapted and evolved, would anyone treat the theory with any respect. For now, Darwin determined to keep his drawer locked.

  His closest friend, the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, wrote to Darwin on December 30, 1844, declaring that he had “been delighted with Vestiges, from the multiplicity of facts he brings together, though I do [not] agree with his conclusions at all, he must be a funny fellow: somehow the book looks more like a 9 days wonder than a lasting work: it certainly is ‘filling at the price.’—I mean the price its reading costs, for it is dear enough otherwise; he has lots of errors.” Darwin replied that he had been “somewhat less amused at it … the writing & arrangement are certainly admirable, but his geology strikes me as bad, & his zoology far worse.” In October 1845, Darwin wrote to Charles Lyell that Sedgwick’s review was a “grand piece of argument against mutability of species” that he had read with “fear & trembling,” but had been “well pleased to find” that he had anticipated Sedgwick’s objections and “had not overlooked any of the arguments.”

  Vestiges became both a thorn in Charles Darwin’s side and a warning. If Vestiges was a fiery cross, a call to arms, then Darwin failed to respond to it. Instead he resolved to wait to see how the book fared, to let others rally to its cry. He read Chambers’s supplementary essay “Explanations” early in 1846 and thought “the spirit of [it], though not the facts, ought to shame Sedgwick.” In April 1847, having met Chambers and received a gift of Vestiges anonymously a few days later, he was now convinced that Chambers was the author.

  For ten years Darwin shifted positions uncomfortably, grappling with his own conscience, unable to decide whether he belonged with the jeering authorities of science and the Church who were throwing stones or with the man who belonged to the clan he knew he also owed allegiance to, the group he had called “us transmutationists” in a letter to Joseph Hooker in 1847. When Huxley sneered at the author of Vestiges in his review of the tenth edition in 1854, Darwin, who was cultivating Huxley as a valuable and influential friend, told him that he thought the review had been “rather hard on the poor author.” At the very least “such a book if it does no other good,” he persisted, “spreads the taste for natural science.” And he worried for the reception of his own book, which, he confessed to Huxley, would be “almost as unorthodox about species as Vestiges itself, though I hope not quite so unphilosophical.” In the introduction to Origin, Darwin mocked rather than defended the book: “The author of the ‘Vestiges of Creation’ would, I presume, say that, after a certain unknown number of generations, some bird had given birth to a woodpecker, and some plant to the mistletoe, and that these had been produced perfect as we now see them; but this assumption seems to me to be no explanation, for it leaves the case of the coadaptations of organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life, untouched and unexplained.”

  When the still anonymous author cried unfair in the next edition of Vestiges, declaring that Darwin’s Origin “expresses substantially the same general ideas [as Vestiges].… The difference seems to be in words, not in facts or effects,” Darwin, his conscience spiked, removed the offending passage from the third edition of Origin (1861) and all subsequent editions. In his “Historical Sketch,” he tried to make amends, writing in more measured tones:

  The author … argues with much force on general grounds that species are not immutable productions. But I cannot see how the two supposed “impulses” account in a scientific sense for the numerous and beautiful co-adaptations which we see throughout nature; I cannot see that we thus gain any insight how, for instance, a woodpecker has become adapted to its peculiar habits of life. The work, from its powerful and brilliant style, though displaying in the earlier editions little accurate knowledge and a great want of scientific caution, immediately had a very wide circulation.… In my opin
ion it has done excellent service in this country in calling attention to the subject, in removing prejudice, and in thus preparing the ground for the reception of analogous views.

  Darwin was not just being polite. He was right. Vestiges had brought transmutation to the people; its author had shown his readers how fascinating it all was, persuaded them how incomprehensibly old the earth must be, how the edges of bodies, even the apparently solid structures of skeletons, were not fixed in stone, but were adaptable, that animals and humans were all joined up, part of an extraordinary moving, spinning, webbed, and interconnected world. He showed them that to hold these thoughts, to imagine those transformations, was neither godless nor dangerous. He had gotten some of his facts badly wrong; in the interest of making a gripping and continuous narrative, he had overstated some things and understated others; and he had failed to find a mechanism by which species might have evolved and diversified through time. But after Vestiges there was no suppressing any of those questions about origins and time. It is difficult to see how Darwin’s Origin might have fared in the world without the ruffling of theological feathers, the raising of dreams, the firing of imaginations and conversations that Vestiges brought into being.

  *Although it had an influence on the development of later sciences such as neuroscience and psychology, phrenology is now regarded as a pseudoscience.