by Janet Browne
Life and Letters, vol. 1, 118
After his lunch, he read the newspaper, lying on the sofa in the drawing-room. I think the paper was the only non-scientific matter which he read to himself. Everything else, novels, travels, history, was read aloud to him…. After he had read his paper, came his time for writing letters. These, as well as the MS. of his books, were written by him as he sat in a huge horse-hair chair by the fire, his paper supported on a board resting on the arms of the chair.
Life and Letters, vol. 1, 118–19
In money and business matters he was remarkably careful and exact. He kept accounts with great care, classifying them, and balancing at the end of the year like a merchant. I remember the quick way in which he would reach out for his account-book to enter each cheque paid, as though he were in a hurry to get it entered before he had forgotten it.
Life and Letters, vol. 1, 120
He had a pet economy in paper, but it was rather a hobby than a real economy. All the blank sheets of letters received were kept in a portfolio to be used in making notes; it was his respect for paper that made him write so much on the backs of his old MS., and in this way, unfortunately, he destroyed large parts of the original MS. of his books.
Life and Letters, vol. 1, 121
He took snuff for many years of his life, having learnt the habit at Edinburgh as a student…. He generally took snuff from a jar on the hall table, because having to go this distance for a pinch was a slight check; the clink of the lid of the snuff jar was a very familiar sound. Sometimes when he was in the drawing-room, it would occur to him that the study fire must be burning low, and when some of us offered to see after it, it would turn out that he also wished to get a pinch of snuff.
Life and Letters, vol. 1, 122
He would often lie on the sofa and listen to my mother playing the piano. He had not a good ear, yet in spite of this he had a true love of fine music. He used to lament that his enjoyment of music had become dulled with age, yet within my recollection his love of a good tune was strong. I never heard him hum more than one tune, the Welsh song “Ar hyd y nos,” which he went through correctly; he used also, I believe, to hum a little Otaheitan song.
Life and Letters, vol. 1, 123
He was extremely fond of novels, and I remember well the way in which he would anticipate the pleasure of having a novel read to him, as he lay down, or lighted his cigarette. He took a vivid interest both in plot and characters, and would on no account know beforehand, how a story finished; he considered looking at the end of a novel as a feminine vice. He could not enjoy any story with a tragical end, for this reason he did not keenly appreciate George Eliot, though he often spoke warmly in praise of Silas Marner. Walter Scott, Miss Austen, and Mrs. Gaskell, were read and re-read till they could be read no more.
Life and Letters, vol. 1, 124–25
Much of his scientific reading was in German, and this was a great labour to him…. When he began German long ago, he boasted of the fact (as he used to tell) to Sir J. Hooker, who replied, “Ah, my dear fellow, that’s nothing; I’ve begun it many times.”
Life and Letters, vol. 1, 126
In the non-biological sciences he felt keen sympathy with work of which he could not really judge. For instance, he used to read nearly the whole of Nature, though so much of it deals with mathematics and physics. I have often heard him say that he got a kind of satisfaction in reading articles which (according to himself) he could not understand.
Life and Letters, vol. 1, 127
Any public appearance, even of the most modest kind, was an effort to him.
Life and Letters, vol. 1, 128
His love of scenery remained fresh and strong. Every walk at Coniston [in the English Lake District] was a fresh delight, and he was never tired of praising the beauty of the broken hilly country at the head of the lake. One of the happy memories of this time [1879] is that of a delightful visit to Grasmere: “The perfect day,” my sister [Henrietta Litchfield] writes, “and my father’s vivid enjoyment and flow of spirits, form a picture in my mind that I like to think of. He could hardly sit still in the carriage for turning round and getting up to admire the view from each fresh point, and even in returning he was full of the beauty of Rydal Water, though he would not allow that Grasmere at all equalled his beloved Coniston.”
Life and Letters, vol. 1, 129
He was always rejoiced to get home after his holidays; he used greatly to enjoy the welcome he got from his dog Polly, who would get wild with excitement, panting, squeaking, rushing round the room, and jumping on and off the chairs; and he used to stoop down, pressing her face to his, letting her lick him, and speaking to her with a peculiarly tender, caressing voice.
Life and Letters, vol. 1, 130
He was never quite comfortable except when utterly absorbed in his writing. He evidently dreaded idleness as robbing him of his one anodyne, work.
L. Darwin 1929, 120
Another quality which was shown in his experimental work, was his power of sticking to a subject; he used almost to apologise for his patience, saying that he could not bear to be beaten, as if this were rather a sign of weakness on his part. He often quoted the saying, “It’s dogged as does it.”
Life and Letters, vol. 1, 149
His courteous and conciliatory tone towards his reader is remarkable, and it must be partly this quality which revealed his personal sweetness of character to so many who had never seen him…. The tone of such a book as the “Origin” is charming, and almost pathetic; it is the tone of a man who, convinced of the truth of his own views, hardly expects to convince others.
Life and Letters, vol. 1, 155–56
The love of experiment was very strong in him, and I can remember the way he would say, “I shan’t be easy till I have tried it,” as if an outside force were driving him.
Life and Letters, vol. 1, 150
His love and goodness towards his little grandson Bernard were great; and he often spoke of the pleasure it was to him to see “his little face opposite to him” at luncheon. He and Bernard used to compare their tastes; e.g., in liking brown sugar better than white, &c.; the result being, “We always agree, don’t we?”
Life and Letters, vol. 1, 135
I have a vivid recollection of the pleasure of turning out my bottle of dead beetles for my father to name, and the excitement, in which he fully shared, when any of them proved to be uncommon ones.
Life and Letters, vol. 2, 140
He walked with a swinging action, using a stick heavily shod with iron, which he struck loudly against the ground, producing as he went round the “Sand-walk” at Down, a rhythmical click which is with all of us a very distinct remembrance.
Life and Letters, vol. 1, 109
Two peculiarities of his indoor dress were that he almost always wore a shawl over his shoulders, and that he had great loose cloth boots lined with fur which he could slip on over his indoor shoes. Like most delicate people he suffered from heat as well as from chilliness; it was as if he could not hit the balance between too hot and too cold.
Life and Letters, vol. 1, 112
In earlier times he took a certain number of turns [around the “Sand-walk”] every day, and used to count them by means of a heap of flints, one of which he kicked out on the path each time he passed. Of late years I think he did not keep to any fixed number of turns, but took as many as he felt strength for.
Life and Letters, vol. 1, 115
When I was at work on Life and Letters I had not seen it [Darwin’s 1842 manuscript essay on natural selection]. It only came to light after my mother’s death in 1896 when the house at Down was vacated. The MS. was hidden in a cupboard under the stairs which was not used for papers of any value, but rather as an overflow for matter which he did not wish to destroy.
F. Darwin 1909, xvii
My father [George Darwin] explained to me once, that my grandfather [Charles Darwin] was rather different from his children, because he was only half a Wedgwood
, while they had a double dose of Wedgwood blood in them, owing to the two Darwin-Wedgwood marriages in two successive generations. “You’ve none of you ever seen a Darwin who wasn’t mostly Wedgwood,” he said, rather sadly, as of a dying strain.
Raverat 1952, 154
During the night of April 18th, about a quarter to twelve, he had a severe attack and passed into a faint, from which he was brought back to consciousness with great difficulty. He seemed to recognise the approach of death, and said, “I am not the least afraid to die.” All the next morning he suffered from terrible nausea and faintness, and hardly rallied before the end came. He died at about four o’clock on Wednesday, April 19th, 1882.
Life and Letters, vol. 3, 358
Tributes
We hope you will not think we are taking a liberty if we venture to suggest that it would be acceptable to a very large number of our countrymen of all classes and opinions that our illustrious countryman, Mr. Darwin, should be buried in Westminster Abbey.
John Lubbock, Memorial, to
G. G. Bradley, Dean of Westminster,
21 April 1882, Life and Letters, vol. 1, 360
In 1859 was published what may be regarded as the most momentous of all his works, “The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection.” No one who had not reached manhood at the time can have any idea of the consternation caused by the publication of this work. We need not repeat the anathemas that were hurled at the head of the simple-minded observer, and the prophecies of ruin to religion and morality if Mr. Darwin’s doctrines were accepted. No one, we are sure, would be more surprised than the author himself at the results which followed. But all this has long passed…. It has been said, perhaps prematurely, that one must seek back to Newton or even Copernicus, to find a man whose influence on human thought and methods of looking at the universe has been as radical as that of the naturalist who has just died.
Obituary, The Times, 21 April 1882, 5
Darwin has been read much, but talked about more. Since the publication of his work “On the Origin of Species” in 1859, and particularly within the 11 years which have elapsed since his “Descent of Man” was given to the world, he has been the most widely known of living thinkers … school children intuitively understood that if man is descended from the ape, he cannot be descended from Adam. All that part of the world which had never thought of such things before was aroused by the shock of the new idea.
Obituary, New York Times, 21 April 1882
He passed that life in elaborating one central idea, and he remained in the world long enough to see the whole course of modern science altered by his speculations.
Obituary, Morning Post, 21 April 1882
Very few, even among those who have taken the keenest interest in the progress of the revolution in natural knowledge set afoot by the publication of the Origin of Species; and who have watched, not without astonishment, the rapid and complete change which has been effected both inside and outside the boundaries of the scientific world in the attitude of men’s minds towards the doctrines which are expounded in that great work, can have been prepared for the extraordinary manifestation of affectionate regard for the man, and of profound reverence for the philosopher, which followed the announcement, on Thursday last, of the death of Mr. Darwin.
T. H. Huxley, Obituary,
Nature, 27 April 1882
We could not think, we could not bear to think, that that untiring and fertile brain, that simple, kindly heart, could cease to work in our midst for many a year yet to come. We looked forward to many another of the familiar green-bound volumes, rich with teeming facts and marvellous applications of minute discovery.
Grant Allen, Obituary, The Academy
21 (29 April 1882): 306
What human life could be more full
Of high achievement, as of years?
Who else has found so much to cull
Of ripened fruit that labour bears?
If life of man must have an end
Who would not gladly end like this?
George Romanes, quoted in
Pleins 2014, 329–30
Why did so many of the greatest intellects fail, while Darwin and myself hit upon the solution of this problem…. As I have found what seems to me a good and precise answer to this question, and one which is of some psychological interest, I will, with your permission, briefly state what it is. On a careful consideration, we find a curious series of correspondences, both in mind and in environment, which led Darwin and myself, alone among our contemporaries, to reach identically the same theory. First (and most important, as I believe), in early life both Darwin and myself became ardent beetle-hunters. Now there is certainly no group of organisms that so impresses the collector by the almost infinite number of its specific forms, the endless modifications of structure, shape, colour, and surface-markings that distinguish them from each other, and their innumerable adaptations to diverse environments.
A. R. Wallace, Darwin-Wallace
celebration 1908, Linnean Society of London, 7–8
You can be a thorough-going Neo-Darwinian without imagination, metaphysics, poetry, conscience, or decency. For “Natural Selection” has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live.
George Bernard Shaw, Back to
Methuselah, 1921, lxi–lxii
The theory of evolution is without any doubt the most important generalization yet made in the field of biology, worthy to rank with the great generalizations of the physical sciences, such as the conservation and degradation of energy, the modern theory of the atom, or Newton’s theory of gravitation.
Julian Huxley 1939, 1
Varia
He was born at Shrewsbury on February 12th, 1809. W. E. Gladstone, Alfred Tennyson, and Abraham Lincoln were born in the same year.
Lankester 1896–97, vol. 2, 4835
Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.
F. Engels, speech at the grave of
Karl Marx, 17 March 1883,
Marxist Internet Archive
She [Henrietta Darwin Litchfield] came to see me and asked what was the matter with me, I said “latent gout.”
“Oh! That’s what we have, does it come from drink in your parents?” It occurred to me that the Darwinian mind must be greater in science than in society.
Alice James, Diary, 228
The popular triumph of Darwinism must be the death-blow to theology…. Evolution and special creation are antagonistic ideas.
Foote 1889, 4–5
Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable; this is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, although Alexandrian doctrines taught something very similar. The second was when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world, implying an ineradicable animal nature in him: this transvaluation has been accomplished in our own time upon the instigation of Charles Darwin, Wallace, and their predecessors, and not without the most violent opposition from their contemporaries.
Freud 1920, 246–47
The first objection to Darwinism is that it is only a guess and was never anything more. It is called a “hypothesis,” but the word “hy pothesis,” though euphonious, dignified and high-sounding, is merely a scientific synonym for the old-fashioned word “guess.” If Darwin had advanced his views as a guess they would not have survived for a year, but they have floated for half
a century, buoyed up by the inflated word “hypothesis.” When it is understood that “hypothesis” means “guess,” people will inspect it more carefully before accepting it.
William Jennings Bryan, New York
Times, 26 February 1922
For a lawyer, I was a fairly grounded scientist. I had been reared by my father on books of science. Huxley’s books had been household guests with us for years, and we had all of Darwin’s as fast as they were published.
Darrow 1932, 250
My dear, descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray it does not become widely known.
Anecdote cited by Montagu 1942, 27
I first became aware of Charles Darwin and evolution while still a schoolboy growing up in Chicago … It is extraordinary the extent to which Darwin’s insights not only changed his contemporaries’ view of the world but also continue to be a source of great intellectual stimulation for scientists and nonscientists alike.
James D Watson, Los Angeles
Times, 18 September 2005
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.
Misattributed to Darwin
SOURCES
Short Titles
Autobiography: see Nora Barlow (ed.), 1958.
Beagle Diary: see R. D. Keynes (ed.), 1988.
Correspondence: see F. H. Burkhardt et al. (eds.), 1983–2016.
DCP: see Darwin Correspondence Project.
Darwin’s Journal: see De Beer (ed.), 1959.
Descent: see Charles Darwin, 1871.
Emma Darwin: see Henrietta Litchfield (ed.), 1904.
Essay 1844: see Francis Darwin (ed.), 1909.
Expression: see Charles Darwin, 1872.
Journal of Researches 1839: see Charles Darwin, 1839.
Journal of Researches 1845: see Charles Darwin, 1845.
Life and Letters: see Francis Darwin (ed.), 1887.