by Janet Browne
Darwin’s honour as a gentleman—as he understood it—was at stake.18 In the competitive scientific world in which he chose to live, publication, originality, and priority made a delicate trio. It was easy to succumb to the temptation to be secretive or be overly quick to publish; and yet the creator of any fresh insight, then as now, must eventually relinquish possession and place his or her ideas in the public domain in order to be given credit for advancing knowledge. The primary spur for Victorians like Darwin was not so much to gain individual power, as it might have been for the politician, nor wealth, as for the businessman, but reputation and professional pride—the need for recognition of the value of one’s endeavour by others in the field. Darwin had always believed that science was something more than a race to publish new findings, or at least on those occasions when he heard of controversies between other men he usually discussed them in censorious terms with Hooker. For this reason, he had considered it wise to wait for his work to mature, wanting above all that it should be right, and regarding any personal desire to be ahead of the field as merely secondary, no doubt idealistic and self-deluded, but sincere. Though this could once have been called a deliberate delay, and might well be attributed to Darwin’s cautious attitude to the external political situation when he first began thinking about evolution, it is likely that by now he was struggling with his own tendency to be a perfectionist. Deep down below, his vision of science glinted with a wish—in turn debilitating or inspiring—to arrive at the truth.
But with Wallace’s letter in his hand he had never felt more vulnerable. It was hard to give up his claim to his life’s work, work in which his whole identity was wrapped. Nonetheless at some point that day he decided he must respect Wallace’s priority. Perhaps he came to think that he wanted to live an honourable life—one that he could contemplate in old age with equanimity, and in which his deeds were fair and his social behaviour as honest as he could make it.19 He wrote to Lyell of “justice” and his dread of any possible “dishonour.” More than this, he may have found solace in an elevated spirit of resignation. He might not be able to conquer the storm of inner feeling but he was able to control his outward conduct. “I certainly was a little annoyed to lose all priority,” he told Lyell, but “resigned myself to my fate.”20
He dispatched the essay to Lyell as Wallace had asked.
My dear Lyell,
Some year or so ago, you recommended me to read a paper by Wallace in the Annals, which had interested you & as I was writing to him, I knew this would please him much, so I told him. He has today sent me the enclosed & asked me to forward it to you. It seems to me well worth reading. Your words have come true with a vengeance that I shd. be forestalled. You said this when I explained to you here very briefly my views of “Natural Selection” depending on the struggle for existence.… Please return me the MS which he does not say he wishes me to publish; but I shall of course at once write & offer to send to any Journal. So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed. Though my Book, if it will ever have any value, will not be deteriorated, as all the labour consists in the application of the theory. I hope you will approve of Wallace’s sketch, that I may tell him what you say.21
So saying, he gave up his right to his life’s work and passed the matter over to his oldest friend.
III
When Darwin called this event a coincidence he was already building up and retreating behind a protective fence of his own making. He evidently found it far less stressful to characterise the situation as a “striking coincidence” than to contemplate the alternatives—alternatives that implied any number of authors might be racing towards his own personal goal or that his concepts were much less innovative than he thought. He disliked finding out that someone else could conjure up his own private brainwave. He had invested his time, his health, and his happiness in the work, and to lose this intellectual capital overnight was as cruel to him as any financial disaster. Darwin had read widely and carefully for many years, always evaluating his own views against those he met in the writings of other naturalists. He genuinely believed no one else held the same combination of ideas as he did. Even his most gifted scientific friends, it seemed to him, were sometimes puzzled by the thrust of his arguments. “I occasionally sounded not a few naturalists, and never happened to come across a single one who seemed to doubt the permanence of species. Even Lyell and Hooker though they would listen with interest to me, never seemed to agree.”22 As a consequence, Darwin felt that he was the only one who really understood his theory or could see how it might work as a biological explanation, those crystalline glimpses of a new kind of knowledge that sustained him through all reversals and urged him to continue. It was hard to accept that he was not the innovator he imagined he was. Along with everything else, his scientific vanity was badly shaken.
Yet Wallace’s letter was really no more of a coincidence than the invitation to travel on the Beagle had been. To start with, there were differences between the two theories that Darwin noticed only when he studied Wallace’s work more thoroughly later on in the summer. Wallace attended far more than he did to the replacement of a parent species by an offspring variety. Wallace wrote of the way that a group of advantaged individuals, say a variety of pigeon that could fly further in times of food shortage, might in time supplant those birds that possessed less stamina. Group replaced group. His view of nature was thus less concerned with individuals than Darwin’s. Second, he declared his belief that there could be no parallel between the natural process of “selection” and what went on under artificial conditions of domestication—a point diametrically opposed to Darwin.23 Any parallel with breeders “selecting” traits in their animals, Wallace said, was “altogether false.” Issues emerging from these differences kept the two naturalists engaged in close debate for the rest of Darwin’s life.
Darwin had also long been blind to many of the changing currents around him. If he had been less inwardly focused on his own projects, or less preoccupied with his health and that of his family, he might not have been so hopelessly taken aback. Wallace had scattered suggestive pointers about the way his thoughts were tending in several articles published in London journals during the 1850s and deliberately raised the problem of accurate distinctions between species and varieties in letters to Darwin. Lyell had drawn these signals to Darwin’s attention during a weekend visit to Down House in 1856.
Other suggestive pointers were just as plain to see. Evolution, Lyell observed, was hanging tensely in the air. Evolution—or something very like it.
If Darwin had lived in London, as Lyell did, or mixed more frequently with the intellectual avant-garde, he must surely have noticed the general swing of progressive, liberal opinion among a small circle of influential figures. Speculative developmental ideas enjoyed fairly wide currency. Mostly these ideas were loosely based on the concept of an inbuilt advance of mankind and society, ideas that ultimately rested on the ideologies of enlightenment and transformation disseminated by European thinkers of the late eighteenth century and revolutionary period, among them Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Darwin’s own grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and that were now revitalised with high Victorian notions of striding forwards. During the 1820s and 1830s, most aspects of this transformist philosophy of nature, including the possibility of changing the nature of the human mind and the structure of society itself, had in Britain come to be associated with scientific rationalism and as often as not the lurking threat of political activism. But by the 1850s, intellectuals were equally liable to embrace the same motifs in the safer form of self-advance, economic progress, and the steady march of civilisation while still taking Lamarck’s name as a general catch-all label for any progressive transmutationary ideas.
Living and working in Paris through the revolutionary period, Lamarck had in fact boldly taken the whole of nature for his study. A true child of the enlightenment, he had believed all living beings were subject to rational laws and proposed that species had evo
lved gradually over eons of time and in interaction with the environment—transformisme, he called it. The mechanisms by which this might take place were equally of his time and were based on his opinion that organisms possessed an innate driving force that pushed them forward in the scale of nature. He thought this sentiment interieur, when stimulated by the animal’s needs, would adapt the animal or plant to its surroundings, as, for example, birds that feed by the shoreline might develop webbed feet. Lamarck’s entirely secular scheme lent itself to becoming incorporated into many other developmental systems based on environmentalism, self-help, and human progress, and was the foundation-stone for some exceptional biological work in the second quarter of the nineteenth century by men such as Robert Grant, Darwin’s former friend at Edinburgh University.24 As a young man Lyell had found Lamarck’s ideas so dangerous—and so exciting—that he devoted a huge section of his Principles of Geology to a blow-by-blow refutation of them.
Now, in 1858, developmental ideas were again exciting the attention of the intelligentsia. The men and women of the Westminster Review, for instance, led by the charismatic editor John Chapman and Mary Ann Evans (the novelist George Eliot), were fascinated by the idea of inbuilt natural laws and steady advance in biology and in human society. To them, God played only a minimal role. Their friends Henry Buckle and Herbert Spencer extolled the march of civilisation. In Spencer’s writings, this took the form of a law of development that Spencer applied to animals and plants as readily as to politics, economics, technology, and human society. Buckle looked more to the history of nations. He told his readers that the sweep of past history indicated that civilised societies would inevitably replace the less advanced. It did not take too much effort for these men and women to assume that their own British culture had come through this mill to exist in the present day as the most advanced in the world.
Much of Spencer’s worldview drew on the same texts and cultural convictions as Darwin’s. During the 1850s he had immersed himself in elaborating the framework of a personal philosophy in which all progress was based on the idea of differentiation. In 1852 he published an essay on the “development hypothesis” in which he defended the theory of animal transmutation, followed by a Malthusian essay, “Theory of Population,” in the Westminster Review, holding that population pressure drove the weakest to the wall. His anti-religious Principles of Psychology (1855) followed shortly afterwards, and by the end of the decade he had begun an ambitious, lifelong reevaluation of metaphysics, the first part published as First Principles in 1862. Spencer believed that biological and social progress were constitutive parts of one broad evolutionary continuum—they were governed by the same immutable laws and controlled by the same forces of nature. He and Buckle fluently adopted Malthusian views as part of the common context of Victorian political economy, biology, and society.
In the same progressive set, George Henry Lewes, the editor of the forward-looking Leader, regular contributor to the Westminster, and admirer of Eliot, delved into anatomy and physiology, proposing that human thought was merely a product of the brain’s activity rather than a gift from God. Supported by William Benjamin Carpenter, another physiologist, Lewes pushed divine agencies right to the background. The two men rejected conventional natural theology, the system of explanation still entrenched in the old universities and predominant in the general run of science publications, and regarded questions about the origins of natural beings and natural phenomena as relevant and intelligible, perhaps even soluble, without any necessary dependence on the divine.
Above all, the anonymous transmutationary tract Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation effortlessly maintained its appeal. Vestiges was by now in its tenth, most enlarged, and most popular edition. “Mr. Vestiges,” as the author was popularly known (he was really Robert Chambers, an Edinburgh publisher and writer), proposed a vast developmental sequence of change in the natural universe, moving from the very first clouds of gas out of which the earth emerged at the beginning of time, through the successive depositions of geological strata, to the first appearance of life and its progressive changes until mankind appeared from apes. Human beings might change still further, it was suggested, especially through advances in mental constitution. Mr. Vestiges displayed a keen interest in phrenology and mental progress. All this was effected without any obvious divine intervention. Whoever the unknown author might be, he or she put forward ideas about the ascent of mankind in easily comprehensible terms that attracted hard-working members of the bourgeoisie and secular thinkers with reform on their minds, appealed to high-minded social theorists advocating advance, and repelled traditional scientists.25
Progress and the march of history were, in short, prominent themes of the age. Linguists and philologists emerged from dusty libraries to draw attention to family lineages in the relationships of words; historians like Buckle spoke of the advance of nations; even reforming Anglican priests like Charles Kingsley could bring his social-realist novel Alton Locke (1850) to a climax with the hero’s dream of a metamorphosis from jellyfish to man. Harriet Martineau shocked pious readers by confidently proclaiming her religious doubt in Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development (1851).
Great currents of change were making their presence felt, in turn political, social, religious, scientific, and economic. Secular thought, and the splintering of the national church, were accelerating, even though congregations were larger than ever before, some people evidently taking fresh impetus from participating in vigorous dissent and others stubbornly adhering to the conventional values of established Anglican doctrine.26 Inside the great gates of an Oxford college, the Rev. Baden Powell frankly discounted miracles and advised contemporaries to take a “perfectly unbiassed and dispassionate view” of evolution, while John Henry Newman turned toward Catholicism.27 Middle-class liberals advocated self-help and the development of the individual human mind through the principles of phrenology. Medical men investigated the chemical origins of life, the material causes of thought, and the possibility of spontaneous generation while physical scientists emphasised the existence of natural laws, laws fashioned by the Creator but left by Him to run under their own steam.28 In Darwin’s former circle of acquaintance, his friends Robert Grant, Edward Blyth, and Hewett Cottrell Watson each advocated some form of evolutionary change—Grant most plainly in his comparative anatomy lectures at University College London.29 Even Lyell was famous for presenting a naturalistic, developmental account of the earth’s physical changes in succeeding editions of his Principles of Geology and for putting forward a well-publicised programme for abandoning the Bible as any sort of accurate guide to science.30 Divine agencies rarely appeared in the writings of figures such as these. One by one, Victorian thinkers claimed the right to investigate the world around them without recourse to God’s miraculous powers. It was much the same in economic terms. Across the nation at large, expanding economic horizons highlighted the prevalence of cut-throat competition, commercial success, and entrepreneurial adaption to circumstance—natural laws of society, it was increasingly said. For the masses, ideas of development and advance supplied potent rhetoric for working people to climb out of the mire of class and poverty, for social revolution, if needs be. There was plenty of evolutionism around for those who had eyes to see it.
Despite Lyell’s warning, Darwin seemingly closed his mind to the possibility that other thinkers might be moving along the same road as he and that any one of them might come up with the same answer. He had the impression that most of his contemporaries were stuck in the creationist mould. There was, for example, the popularity of Hugh Miller’s book about fossils, emotively titled Footprints of the Creator, and the continued enthusiastic readership for the natural theological panaceas of the Bridgewater Treatises. Then there were Richard Owen’s and Louis Agassiz’s schemes of archetypes and homological relationships between organisms that depended on a supreme intelligence for their existence. Darwin saw provincial vicars refuting geology as “a lie
and delusion of Satan,” tracts that he and Lyell read in amused disbelief.31 He was aware of Philip Henry Gosse’s Omphalos, published in 1857, in which Gosse declared that God created fossils inside the rocks, and Adam and Eve with belly buttons, expressly to give the appearance of a history that had existed long before the first day of creation—the same ardent desire to reconcile faith and science that Gosse’s son Edmund would pity in Father and Son decades later, and that goaded Kingsley into announcing that God would scarcely have written on the rocks “one enormous and superfluous lie.” Natural history journals were full of the terminology of design and perfection. It was easy for Darwin to believe he that was the outsider, alone except for Lyell, Hooker, and a few others, in holding these new ideas against the conservative tide. He was used to bracing himself for theological opposition, to persuading, to chipping away at the reservations of those people he let into his secret.
He had no particular reason to consider Wallace a potential hazard either. In the starkest sense, Darwin had no real cause to notice him at all during the short time he had corresponded with him, regarding him as a mere collector, a self-financing naturalist obliged to sell unusual specimens to cover his costs, a traveller who would be only too willing to supply information and specimens to a gentleman at home. He could not even remember having met Wallace, although Wallace afterwards said they had once spoken briefly at the British Museum. Wallace possessed no independent means, was not of the landed gentry or the university-educated classes, and, thought Darwin blandly, probably had little occasion for contemplative philosophical endeavour. Darwin knew—or thought he knew—scores of helpful men who supplied gentlemen with valuable bits of information, not exactly as a labourer might supply a master, or a protégé satisfy a patron, but rather as a necessary functionary in a service economy that depended on hierarchies of exchange where knowledge was the commodity and shifting social boundaries provided the channels of opportunity and collaboration that made Victorian science so very distinctive.32 At this point in Darwin’s life, the flow of material was always one way, towards himself. If he thought about Wallace at all, he probably would have regarded him merely as supplying basic data that he—Darwin—would turn into acceptable science. To be sure, he pleasantly acknowledged Wallace’s interest in theories of animal distribution. “I am a firm believer that without speculation there is no good and original observation,” he told him in 1857. Yet as soon as personal contact was established, he hardly bothered to engage Wallace in serious discussion. All he wanted from Wallace was exotic poultry skins and answers to a few specialised natural history questions.