by Janet Browne
In all this, there was a special resonance between the man and his domestic setting. By now the Darwins had lived at Down House for sixteen years, a fruitful, relatively placid time during which he and Emma produced eight of their ten children. Two of these children had died in childhood. One was buried in the churchyard of the small flint-walled Anglican church in Downe, the other in Malvern after a disastrous trip to the water-cure. He and Emma had mourned heavily over these losses. But despite the emotional toll, Darwin felt wholly content in Downe. The remaining children were William, the oldest, born in 1839, Henrietta (b. 1843), George (b. 1845), Elizabeth (b. 1847), Francis (b. 1848), Leonard (b. 1850), Horace (b. 1851), and little Charles, the baby, born in 1856. He and his family were an integral part of the fabric of town and country life that characterised the landed classes in Britain during the middle years of the nineteenth century. Without this sense of place, Darwin could hardly have hoped to bring his work on natural selection and the origin of species to completion. His home, and the lifestyle of a country gentleman that he created within it, gave him the peace he needed and time to consider every part of his argument.
Without this sense of place, too, his work would not have taken the singular character that it did. His life and his science were of a piece. The tumble of ideas that had characterised the first half of his existence was giving way to the methodical intensity of documenting and reinforcing his notions. His home and garden were his experimental laboratories, his book-lined study was his manufactory; these were the places where he most liked to be. He discovered that he valued routine—and went to great lengths to create a well-regulated household in which he was left free for the steady construction of facts. More than this, his home and his homelife became an actual part of his intellectual enterprise. Over the years, Darwin bred pigeons, grew pots of seeds in his outhouses, observed bees moving across his flowerbeds, tracked worms in the fields that he saw from his drawing-room window, counted blades of grass in his lawn, watched his infant children in the nursery, and pondered the twists and turns of climbing weeds in his hedges, all the while seeking the detailed evidence of adaptation in living beings that he believed to be the keystone of his project. Although his Beagle experiences were still important to him and always carried due weight in his writings, and his particular insight into nature remained undimmed, these home-based researches were the hidden triumph of his theory of evolution. His family setting, his house and garden, the surrounding Kent countryside, and his own sense of himself at the heart of the life he had created and the property he owned provided the finely crafted examples of adaptation in action that lifted his work far out of the ordinary. His thinking path, the path he called the Sandwalk that skirted the edge of a copse at the bottom of the Down House garden, became the private source of his conviction that his theory was true—true, if only he could show it.
Solitude served him well here. But Darwin was not a complete rural recluse. Systematically, he turned his house into the hub of an ever-expanding web of scientific correspondence. Tucked away in his study, day after day, month after month, Darwin wrote letters to a remarkable number and variety of individuals. He relied on these letters for every aspect of his evolutionary endeavour, using them not only to pursue his investigations across the globe but also to give his arguments the international spread and universal application that he and his colleagues regarded as essential footings for any new scientific concept. They were his primary research tool. Furthermore, after the Origin of Species was published, he deliberately used his correspondence to propel his ideas into the public domain—the primary means by which he ensured his book was being read and reviewed. His study inside Down House became an intellectual factory, a centre of administration and calculation, in which he churned out requests for information and processed answers, kept himself at the leading edge of contemporary science, and ultimately orchestrated a transformation in Victorian thought.
This took place on the grand scale. Darwin wrote or received some fourteen thousand letters that are still in existence in libraries the world over, and there must have been as many again now lost to posterity.10 By far the largest number of letters were exchanged with his closest scientific friends—Charles Lyell, Joseph Hooker, Asa Gray, and Thomas Henry Huxley, men who supported and helped him through thick and thin. These friends were prominent naturalists in their own right, each in his way representing major branches of the Victorian natural history sciences and important scientific institutions. Through them Darwin gained access to the machinery of international intellectual endeavour, and while Huxley may have earned most of the subsequent historical plaudits as Darwin’s chief defender and publicist, the roles played in Darwin’s life by Joseph Hooker at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, by Asa Gray at Harvard University, and by Charles Lyell, an independent gentleman-geologist in London, should not be underestimated. This intimate network proved crucial to Darwin both personally and in the eventual acceptance of evolutionary ideas. Otherwise, the largest group of his correspondents were German-speaking naturalists, more than one hundred different individuals. Darwin wrote to his overseas contacts in old-fashioned, stilted English, apologising quaintly for his lack of languages.
He also hunted down anyone who could help him on specific issues, from civil servants, army officers, diplomats, fur-trappers, horse-breeders, society ladies, Welsh hill-farmers, zookeepers, pigeon-fanciers, gardeners, asylum owners, and kennel hands, through to his own elderly aunts or energetic nieces and nephews. Many of his letters went to residents of far-flung regions—India, Jamaica, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, China, Borneo, the Hawaiian Islands—reflecting the increasing European domination of the globe and rapidly improving channels of communication.11 There was only one postbag in Downe village, and it looks as if Darwin’s daily activities could have filled it alone. In 1851 he spent £20 on “stationery, stamps & newspapers” (nearly £1,000 in modern terms), paying a monthly invoice to James Verrel, the newsagent in Bromley High Street, and a smaller sum to Albert Sales of the George Inn at the crossroads in Downe, the village publican, grocer, and postmaster. By 1877 Darwin’s expenditure on postage and stationery had doubled to £53 14s. 7d, a sum roughly equal to his butler’s annual salary. Every part of his life was run by letters—and the lives of his family members too. “Everyone obeyed the advice given by a family poet,” remarked a granddaughter cordially some fifty years later.
Write a letter, write a letter;
Good advice will make us better;
Father, mother, sister, brother,
Let us all advise each other.12
If there was any single factor that characterised the heart of Darwin’s scientific undertaking it was this systematic use of correspondence. Darwin made the most of his position as a gentleman and scientific author to obtain what he needed. He was a skilful strategist. The flow of information that he initiated was almost always one-way. Like countless other well-established figures of the period, Darwin regarded his correspondence primarily as a supply system, designed to answer his own wants. “If it would not cause you too much trouble,” he would write. “Pray add to your kindness,” “I feel that you will think you have fallen on a most troublesome petitioner,” “I trust to your kindness to excuse my troubling you.” “If any man wants to gain a good opinion of his fellow men, he ought to do what I am doing, pester them with letters,” he once said to John Jenner Weir, the ornithologist. “Best & most beloved of men, I supplicate & entreat you to observe one point for me,” he cried to Hooker. There was no need for Darwin to doubt the legitimacy of this one-way arrangement. After all, he occupied an assured place in the intellectual elite, at the heart of an expanding scientific and social meritocracy that in turn lay at the hub of one of the most powerful and systematically organised empires known to history. He made vigorous use of these advantages.
People usually did what he asked. From time to time, he would reward his correspondents by forwarding their articles or introducing them to London exper
ts, and perhaps they felt this was return enough. It is clear that he functioned near the top of a hierarchical social structure that facilitated such interactions. Among his closer friends, however, Darwin was unwilling to appear quite so exploitative. There he built rather more of a network of give and take, responding to his colleagues with friendly encouragement and support.
One way or another, these men and women, near and far, contributed materially to his developing project and its subsequent trajectory in the world at large. Darwin’s completed theory of evolution ought perhaps to be seen as the interplay between the creative vision residing in a single mind and a mass of information gathered from many different hands, including his own. Whether the man himself might, with hindsight, be characterised either as a hero of science, an observer par excellence, a political animal, or a nervous, reclusive revolutionary, his achievements were manifestly the product of a highly efficient Victorian communication system, firmly embedded in what can be called knowledge-producing relationships. With pen and ink and postage stamps he set about constructing what he hoped would be “a considerable revolution in natural history.” Alone at his desk, captain of his ship, safely anchored in his country estate on the edge of a tiny village in Kent, he was in turn manager, chief executive, broker, and strategist for a world-wide enterprise. Once, in a passing compulsion, he attached a mirror to the inside of his study window, angled so that he could catch the first glimpse of the postman turning up the drive. It stayed there for the rest of his life.
Such a life obviously depended on the postal system, the preeminent collective enterprise of the Victorian period, and Darwin sensed the splendour of this organisation as readily as Anthony Trollope, who, after novelising the nation before breakfast, would go to his employment in the General Post Office in London. No one would believe the number of letters surging across nineteenth-century Britain, said Rowland Hill, the inventor of the penny postage system. By mid-century, 600 million letters were dispatched every year. Twenty-five thousand delivery men travelled 149,000 miles to distribute these letters, carrying in their sacks a weight of nearly 4,300 tons. Carrier services transported 72 million newspapers, 12 million book parcels, and 7 million money-orders a year, and 68 million letters moved around the capital alone, requiring eleven deliveries a day. Prime ministers, civil servants, and Queen Victoria ran the country with a daily outpouring of well-turned phrases, and countless novelists relied on the prompt arrival and dispatch of letters to carry their plots along, confident that readers were involved in similar processes. The tide of correspondence, wrote Hill, “knew no ebb.”13 Letters became more informal, more up-to-date, more personal, and more frequent, pulling the edges of family and empire together and convincing Britons that their country was one of the most advanced nations in the world.
Now that nearly 150 years have passed since the Origin of Species was published, and its place in modern thought is assured, Darwin’s life can be explored from the inside looking out, from the domestic, respectable, pastoral setting in which he chose to locate himself to the extensive letter-based connections he created with the world beyond; and from the outside looking in, through the eyes of others, close or far away. His book came to represent the spirit of the age. Although Trollope and Darwin never met, each would have felt completely at home in the other’s sphere. Yet if anyone had told Darwin how famous he would become, he would have been very surprised.
II
Picking up a thin, well-wrapped package one morning in June 1858, Darwin wondered who could be writing to him from Ternate, an island in the Dutch East Indies halfway between Celebes and New Guinea. His web of correspondents already circled the globe. India, Africa, Tasmania, South America—over the years he had gathered contacts in every quarter feeding his insatiable appetite for facts.
He was interested to recognise Alfred Russel Wallace’s handwriting on the package. He knew Wallace to be a talented man, full of the intrepid scientific spirit that Darwin most admired, and at that time travelling rough in Indonesia and Malaysia collecting rare natural history specimens. A year or so beforehand Darwin had asked Wallace if he could possibly get the skins of some Malayan poultry for him. He hoped there were unusual details about tropical birds or animals described inside.
But the package contained nothing of the sort. Although Wallace’s words were unassuming and polite enough, they had cataclysmic effect. Darwin’s life was never the same again.
What the packet enclosed was a short handwritten essay which, line by line, spelled out virtually the same theory of evolution by natural selection that Darwin believed was his alone. Isolated in the jungle for four years, Wallace had independently hit on the same argument as Darwin. All of Darwin’s main ideas were repeated. To Darwin’s agitated mind these ideas seemed to hang together in Wallace’s essay far better than they did in his own unpublished writings. Wallace wrote clearly—so clearly that no one could mistake his meaning. The struggle for survival among animals and plants; competition and extinction; the improvement of domestic races by selection; the divergence of species into different forms: all these were included. Malthus was there. So was Lyell. Wallace demonstrably removed the divine Creator and proposed an entirely natural origin for species. His words indicated that he fully understood the significance of what he was saying. “It is the object of the present paper to show … that there is a general principle in nature which will cause many varieties to survive the parent species, and to give rise to successive variations departing further and further from the original type.”
It is evident that, of all the individuals composing the species, those forming the least numerous and most feebly organized variety would suffer first, and, were the pressure severe, must soon become extinct.… The superior variety would then alone remain, and on a return to favourable circumstances would rapidly increase in numbers and occupy the place of the extinct species and variety. The variety would now have replaced the species, of which it would be a more perfectly adapted and more highly organized form.14
Darwin was stunned. “I never saw a more striking coincidence,” he moaned helplessly. “If Wallace had my MS sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract!”15
He was well and truly forestalled. It was impossible to pretend otherwise. All his originality was smashed, all his years of hard work suddenly useless. For a moment the news hit him like the death of a child. Then, his mind churned with painful emotions—not anxiety or panic, he confessed afterwards, but much baser feelings of mortification, possessiveness, irritation, and rancour, each flaring up one by one after the first unaccountable, humiliating surprise. Hour after hour they returned, making him cross and edgy. “It is miserable in me to care at all about priority,” he complained to Hooker and Lyell that day. “Full of trumpery feelings.” These were probably the most lonely hours of his life, facing the knowledge that what mattered to him now was not so much the long-gone moment of discovery but the possession, the ownership, of his theory. Wallace’s easy brilliance forced him to confront the focus of his entire working life. Had it all been a waste of time? Those years he had spent labouring over barnacles, the deterioration of his physical health, the endless attention to notes and letters, and the huge manuscript so close to completion? He caught himself wondering truculently if his own letters to Wallace, brief as they had been, might somehow have given the game away. The resemblance of their ideas was startling.
Nevertheless Wallace was obviously acting in good faith. It was evident he had no idea that Darwin was so well advanced on a project so similar to his own, even though they had discussed species and varieties in letters beforehand. In his accompanying note he asked Darwin to pass the essay on to Sir Charles Lyell if it seemed sufficiently interesting. Since Lyell was often instrumental in bringing the work of unknown naturalists into the public eye, this was a reasonable request to make, and Wallace, who had no personal access to prominent scientific figures, manifestly hoped for the kind of friendly introduction that D
arwin could provide. Moreover, his essay explicitly drew on Lyell’s Principles of Geology, especially on Lyell’s critical account of Lamarck’s theory of transformation and his commentary on the creation, adaptation, and extinction of species. The essay, in short, had been composed for Lyell, not for Darwin. Yet it would have been near-impossible at that period for Wallace to write directly to Lyell. A favourable word from Darwin would help him along. And Wallace knew that Darwin and Lyell were friends—Darwin had told Wallace so in a previous letter. Beyond that, Wallace knew that Darwin’s Journal of Researches had been warmly dedicated to Lyell.
One letter—and Darwin was shipwrecked. His dilemma was profound, as intense as any in his life, although the course of his action was plain to him. All his moral instincts—his strong sense of duty, his unquestioning acceptance of gentlemanly responsibilities, his pleasant nature, his honourable feelings—told him he must comply with Wallace’s request, and, moreover, acknowledge to Lyell that Wallace had got there first. There is no reason to suppose that he hesitated, or at least not for long.16 A less scrupulous person might perhaps have destroyed the essay and pretended it never arrived. A long journey from the Far East supplied a ready excuse should one be needed. A less candid man might have delayed and delayed, unwilling to concede the point until his own work was published.17