by Janet Browne
On another occasion he looked after an infant orang-utan orphaned by his own shotgun. Again like Darwin, Wallace’s affectionate feelings for animals created a fertile context for more philosophical juxtapositions. There never was such a baby as my baby, he told his sister. “I am sure nobody ever had such a dear little duck of a darling of a brown hairy baby before.”49 By now he was keen to draw connections between various groups of humanity and between humans and animals. He felt he could see evolution everywhere. Grateful simply for the opportunity to be there, he named one of the world’s most beautiful butterflies after the rajah, the giant black-and-golden-green birdwing, Ornithoptera brookeana.
Before leaving Sarawak, Wallace composed and dispatched to England the short theoretical paper that Lyell—and then Darwin and Edward Blyth—saw in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History for 1855.50 “Every species has come into existence coincident both in time and space with a pre-existing closely allied species,” he stated. Geographical proximity was a measure of biological connection, he declared to Bates in a letter. He was disappointed to hear from Stevens that he ought not to be thinking about such esoteric topics. Several naturalists at the Entomological Society apparently expressed regret that he was “theorizing” when what they really wanted was more facts and specimens.
When Darwin initiated an occasional correspondence with Wallace, both of them were pleased. As always, Darwin desired skins, bones, and information, even though he exclaimed that the carriage from Singapore “is costing me a fortune!” Courteously, Darwin relayed the fact that both he and Lyell had been interested by Wallace’s article, a compliment that was not hard to give and which Darwin felt sure would gratify its recipient. His letter was a model of friendly encouragement: “I can plainly see that we have thought much alike.… In regard to paper in Annals, I agree to the truth of almost every word.” However, with Lyell’s advice to push on with his book ringing in his ears, Darwin delicately established his seniority in that area by remarking that he was in fact composing a large book on species and varieties.51
Either Wallace was too untutored in the ways of the world to notice or he was too caught up in his own thoughts to pay strict attention. Darwin’s words revealed their meaning only in retrospect; then as now, men could write at some length to each other without necessarily recognising what was really being said. Wallace had no reason to suspect Darwin was warning him off. In any case, Wallace was glad to hear that Darwin was dealing with the problem of species and varieties. Wallace told Bates that such a book would save him a lot of bother. He was plainly glad to have established contact.
Even making allowances for Wallace’s memory afterwards playing tricks, it is clear that ideas about geographical distribution were as important to him in generating the idea of natural selection as they had been to Darwin. In Malaysia, Wallace said, he was particularly interested in the territorial boundaries separating the many different human tribes that he encountered. These boundaries were etched by warfare and village custom as well as by geographical features like ocean straits, rivers, and mountain ranges. The human divisions that he was identifying appeared to be paralleled by similar dividing lines between groups of animals and plants originating from either Asia or the Pacific.52 Soon Wallace was on the point of discerning an imaginary line marking the contact between each great set of species. He discovered that animals and plants seemingly never crossed that line—there were in the archipelago invisible boundaries between aboriginal floras and faunas, dividing lines that inscribed the site of the creation of animals and plants and marked their ability to push outwards as far as time and circumstances allowed. Geography emerged as a vital key to origins. Wallace became convinced that the spatial arrangement and competitive struggle between living beings went a long way towards explaining the origin of species.
And it is equally clear that Malthus’s writings were important. In February 1858, at the end of a long week spent collecting specimens on the island of Gilolo (Halmahera) in the Moluccas, Wallace thought he might have located the dividing line between indigenous and invading humans. The original population of Gilolo, he noted, was exceedingly small, vulnerable to every blow of nature. These indigenous peoples would not survive much longer, at least not while incoming Malays and Papuans continued to prove such assertively dominant immigrants.
His conclusions were reached during a bout of malaria. Fifty years later he recalled that all he could do while waiting for the shivering fits to play out their daily cycle was to lie down and think.
One day something brought to my recollection Malthus’s Principles of Population, which I had read about twelve years before. I thought of his clear exposition of “the positive checks to increase”—disease, accidents, war, and famine—which keep down the population of savage races to so much lower an average than that of more civilized peoples.… It then suddenly flashed upon me that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain—that is, the fittest would survive.53
Perhaps inspired by the fever, Wallace worked out the scheme in his head. Impatiently, he set sail back to Ternate, to his rented house, with its bed, books, food, quinine, and scientific records. In the calm of the evenings, he said, he devoted the next few days to writing his essay. He compared his ideas with his private notes on Lyell, Lamarck, and Vestiges, signed it “Ternate, February 1858,” and put it in the next post to England.54 Above all, he wanted Lyell to read it. He chose to send it to Darwin because of Darwin’s expressed interest in the subject and his proximity to Lyell.
Wallace naturally remembered this act of creative thought as his greatest intellectual achievement. Modestly, he never pretended to comprehend how it had come about. Many years later, he tentatively suggested that he and Darwin had arrived at the same conclusion because of their mutual fondness for collecting beetles.55
But the real machinery below Wallace’s thoughts—as Darwin’s—had been operating for years. Wallace, like Darwin, had grown up in a Malthusian universe. He was well primed to see the tribes of Gilolo falling prey to the same inexorable rules as the people of Wales or Leicestershire; and sufficiently versed in anti-Malthusian socialist doctrines to know how far he could pursue the idea.56 The harsh pressure of numbers, agricultural hardship, cycles of economic boom and bust, the role of natural law, and the vagaries of financial success and failure—Wallace had encountered them all. Competition and the differential survival rates dictating a community’s future progress came effortlessly to mind.
And if not from Malthus direct, there was always his well-thumbed copy of Lyell’s Principles of Geology to hand (a book which travelled with him to Malaysia), or the second edition of Darwin’s Journal of Researches, in which Darwin briefly alluded to the everlasting Malthusian war in nature.57 Perhaps he recalled conversations with Rajah Brooke about low birth rates among the Dyaks and precarious food supplies on Aru. He had access to the library of Mr. Duivenboden, the cultivated Dutch merchant who was Wallace’s host in Ternate.
Even so, the parallels between Wallace’s and Darwin’s thoughts are no less remarkable for their cultural symmetry. A common political, intellectual, and national context linked the two inseparably. Their experiences of geographical exploration and travel in the early imperial era, their various connections with competitive, commercial Britain, their mutual appreciation of the marvels of nature and overwhelming desire to understand them, their unfaltering belief in human unity, the reciprocal letters, shared reading material, and concurrent preoccupations came together in a single cathartic burst of identity: two thoughtful men who would rather face the ocean than the crowd, looking deep into nature.
V
Darwin barely had time to consider what to do next. He glumly sent Wallace’s essay and his own covering letter to Lyell. Within twenty-four hours another kind of crisis erupted.
Family illness descended without warning. First, his daughter Henrietta, age
d fifteen, came down with a raging temperature and sore throat. Darwin and Emma feared she might have caught diphtheria, the frightening new disease invading Britain in epidemic waves from France during 1858 and 1859, as deadly in its way as the continuing threat of a military invasion under Louis Napoleon’s orders. The county of Kent was already under siege. “No actual choking, but immense discharge & much pain & inability to speak or swallow & very weak & rapid pulse, with a fearful tongue,” Darwin wrote in consternation to Hooker.58 Both parents took turns to nurse her. Apprehensively, they asked their Mackintosh relatives, who were guests in the house, to return home; and just as apprehensively, they called for Emma’s older sister Elizabeth Wedgwood to come over from Hartfield, near Tunbridge Wells, to help with the nursing. Unintentionally making a bad situation worse, George’s headmaster wrote from school to say their second son had caught measles, another dangerous disease in the years before antibiotics and mass vaccination programmes. At any other time they would have brought him home. Now, they asked Mr. Pritchard to keep him at school in isolation.
The following day the baby was taken ill with fever. This baby, Charles Waring Darwin, was their tenth and last child, at that point around nineteen months old. Although Emma must have long before then been ready to call a halt to childbearing (she was forty-eight when the child was born), she and Darwin enjoyed and loved little Charles as devotedly as any of their children. Conception so late in the day was probably something of a weary surprise to her: it had been five years since Horace, the previous child, was born. Emma may have been a little disappointed, too, with the arrival of yet another boy, making four in a row. But in all events, she had been pleased with the new baby, a fat placid soul as Darwin eventually recorded. She and Darwin were greatly worried by the intensity of his terrible fever. They urgently summoned Edward Illot, the medical surgeon from Bromley, to give his advice.
Darwin was in no state of mind to make any kind of balanced assessment about competing claims over his or Wallace’s priority. Still, he was correct about Lyell in one sense. Loyally, the geologist rose up in the strongest possible way to defend his friend’s interests. Intellectual property rights were an important issue in Lyell’s eyes, and their defence demanded quick and decisive action. Lyell was a hard man to contradict when he was involved in priority disputes.59 By return of post he strongly recommended that Darwin publish a short statement of his own.
Sitting up with the sick baby, Darwin agonised. He said that Lyell was proposing the impossible. “I shd be extremely glad now to publish a sketch of my general views in about a dozen pages or so. But I cannot persuade myself that I can do so honourably.… I would far rather burn my whole book than that he or any man shd think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit.” He told Lyell that Wallace had tied his hands by sending the essay to him first. Now that he had read it, he could hardly justify any move to publish his own statement. “I cannot tell whether to publish now would not be base & paltry: this was my first impression, & I shd have certainly acted on it, had it not been for your letter.” His mind dwelled on the letter he had already begun to write to Wallace, a letter in which he gave up all his priority.60
But the dilemma would not go away. The thought of publishing something was undeniably attractive if only it could be done honourably. Hesitantly, he asked Lyell to discuss it with Hooker so that he could get the judgement of “my two best & kindest friends.” As the baby worsened, he thought about it ceaselessly, although to very little effect. In the end he wanted “to banish whole subject.… I am worn out with musing.”
Back came another letter a few days later. Lyell and Hooker suggested publishing Darwin and Wallace together, a compromise that accommodated everybody’s needs as best as possible. With hindsight, it was a gentlemanly solution. Darwin’s priority would not be lost, and he could carry on writing his big book; Wallace’s views would be published in a way that would greatly enhance their interest and acceptability.
At the time, it certainly looked like the most straightforward and acceptable course of action that could have been devised. And in the years that followed, no two authors thrown together in such a fashion tried harder than Darwin and Wallace to treat each other fairly. Each regarded the other with respect, admiration, and generosity.
Yet for a while the proposal trembled on the edge of audacious skulduggery. No pair of practised fixers could, if they wished, have cooked up a better scheme for promoting Darwin’s interests. First and foremost, Wallace did not know anything about the proposal. His private communication to Darwin on a natural history matter, sent out to Lyell for comment, was to be announced without his knowledge and as an accompaniment to writings about which he knew nothing. On the face of it, it looked as if Lyell and Hooker were suggesting that their friend Darwin—a man at the heart of scientific society—should not lose out to an interloper. On the broader scale, they may well have felt compelled to safeguard the values of elite Victorian knowledge—the science of accredited experts, authenticated fact, proper sequences of logical inference, and trustworthy sources—from outsiders like Wallace.
Briskly, Lyell and Hooker proposed reading Wallace’s essay and some extracts from Darwin’s unpublished manuscripts at a forthcoming meeting of the Linnean Society of London and then sending them forward for publication. Hooker was on the council of the Linnean and was aware that a recent meeting had been cancelled because of the death of Robert Brown, a former president. The rescheduled meeting was coming up in the following week, on 1 July 1858, at the empty end of the scientific season, and Hooker suggested squeezing the Darwin-Wallace material onto the programme. Lyell was due to present an obituary speech about Brown at the same meeting.
They chose the Linnean for entirely opportunistic reasons. Lyell, Hooker, and Darwin were all fellows of the society and council members (Darwin was elected to the council in May 1858). Hooker virtually ran the journal and saw the programme secretary constantly. All three were friends of the current president, Thomas Bell, and other officials and members. With these connections Lyell and Hooker could reasonably expect to have their way, much more so than if they had set their sights on the Royal Society of London, for example, hemmed in with the formal structure of timetables, referees, and the unspoken conventions appropriate to the leading natural philosophical body in the country; or the Zoological Society, where the atmosphere was edgy and the fellows prone to argue. Elsewhere in London, the Botanical Society was almost moribund, the Royal Institution in Albermarle Street preferred lecturers to present their own results, the Geological Society did not usually regard living organisms as suitable topics, and the British Association for the Advancement of Science held its meeting annually, in a different city every year, with the timetable prepared months in advance. Nor were periodicals a pertinent outlet. As Lyell and his circle were coming to accept, the first announcement of serious scientific results belonged not in the monthly or fortnightly magazines, where the aims were broadly cultural, and not in popular natural history weeklies, where the material was often unsubstantiated and (in the eyes of the elite) sometimes notably off-beam, but in the presentation of a theory at a learned society, in front of an educated audience, and then publication at a measured pace in that society’s learned journal.
Wallace, on the other hand, was known among the Linnean fellows only as a purveyor of specimens, whose closest relationship was with William Wilson Saunders, the wealthy entomologist who was one of the Linnean’s longstanding vice-presidents. Over the years, Saunders purchased a huge quantity of Wallace’s tropical insects through Samuel Stevens. Nearly two-thirds of the annual Journal were filled with the ensuing lists and catalogues. But for various reasons, Wallace would not be elected a fellow of the Linnean until 1871.61 Under normal circumstances any contribution of his to a learned society would have to be submitted on his behalf by a fellow. Since Wallace’s customary publishing domain was the world of popular magazines like the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Lyell’s and Hooker’s actions impli
ed that he was lucky to hitch a ride on Darwin’s well-cut coat-tails.
No other venue could conceivably offer such obliging attention. Furthermore, Hooker and Lyell seemingly believed no delay could be permitted. For all they knew, Wallace might have sent a copy of the same article or a longer, more detailed version elsewhere for publication. Unless they moved quickly, they must have thought, control of the situation would be lost.
Before Darwin could reply to this startling suggestion, baby Charles became very ill indeed. He had scarlet fever of the most violent kind: “the deadliest of all the fevers,” declared the Lancet.62 Time after time, the older Darwin children had wrestled with the same disease and survived. But three infants in Downe died that month, and families all over the country were encountering the tragedy of losing first one, then another child to the epidemic. Darwin and Emma could hardly bear to see their child’s suffering. They were almost grateful when, after nearly a week of misery, he died on the evening of 28 June. “It was the most blessed relief,” wrote Darwin sorrowfully, “to see his poor little innocent face resume its sweet expression in the sleep of death.”63
The two were distraught. This was the baby of their middle age, their last child, the one they felt most relaxed about, with a “remarkably sweet, placid & joyful disposition.” It seems that the baby may have been slightly retarded, although there is no actual evidence to suggest a disability like Down’s syndrome. He was “backward in walking & talking, but intelligent & observant,” said his father. There could be nothing prettier, remarked Darwin, than his passion for Joseph Parslow. When the butler came into a room, little Charles would stretch out his arms to be carried. He would lie on Darwin’s lap for any length of time, gravely studying his father’s face or waiting for a game. When Henrietta later came to write her mother’s life story she probably underestimated both the love that Emma and Charles felt for him and his mental capacities. She thought he was born without his “full share of intelligence” and that after the first sorrow Emma was “thankful” at his early death.64