by Janet Browne
Even so, he probably felt a stab of regret to find he was not alone in his ideas. To his lasting credit, he never afterwards displayed the smallest flicker of resentment. As with Darwin, the unexpected collision revealed his finest qualities.
II
Duty done, Darwin lost no time in getting the children away from infection. “You may imagine how frightened we have been,” he wrote to Fox after the baby’s funeral. “It has been a most miserable fortnight.” Tense with worry, he propelled the whole ailing entourage out of Downe. He aimed for recuperation in some attractive—and distracting—spot. “To the day of my death I shall never forget all the sickening fear about the other children after our poor little baby died.”5 Emma was exhausted, he noted. The rest of the household fared no better, with Henrietta fractious in her convalescence, and Jane the nursery maid (Parslow’s daughter) showing signs of what might similarly turn into scarlet fever. The personal strain of the last two weeks left him feeling like “living lumber.” He scarcely had sufficient emotion left to absorb the news of his sister Marianne’s death that same week, aged sixty. He and Erasmus agreed that Marianne’s children should be looked after by Susan and Catherine Darwin, the remaining Shrewsbury sisters, and Susan, who had always shown a particular fondness for these nephews, brought them back to the old family home under her responsibility.6 Marianne’s husband, Henry Parker, had died several years before. Even though people’s relationships with death and dying have changed over the centuries, and the experience of grieving in Victorian times was bound by many different systems of class and belief, these deaths, coming so close together, were still a harsh reality for the Darwins. Emma could probably take consolation in Christian assurances about immortality. Her church’s doctrines assured her that she would meet her children and other loved ones in heaven. Darwin confronted mortality in solitude and isolation. Old or young, death came knocking.7 In retrospect, it seems possible that Emma may have suffered twice over from not being able to share religious consolation with her doubting husband.
But recuperate they did. After a cautious journey made in stages to Portsmouth, and then across to the Isle of Wight, with seven children in tow ranging from William, aged nineteen, to Horace, nearly seven, plus a separate carriage full of trunks and maids, a wheeled invalid chair and pet kitten for Henrietta, and one of the indispensable Thorley sisters drafted in for the emergency as a temporary governess, they began to feel easier as soon as they arrived. This tiny offshore island had long been a summer location for royalty, poets, and gentlefolk. Above all, it was quiet, and as Darwin told Fox when they came to rest in the King’s Head Hotel, Sandown, “suits us very fairly.” They found a villa to rent in Shanklin further down the coast, “the nicest sea-side place which we have ever seen.” The rented villa was nicely situated at the foot of the cliffs on the edge of an immense sandy bay. Darwin hoped the sea air would blow away some of Henrietta’s listless malaise. The little boys, he said appreciatively, were very happy in the sand.
Gradually, his private tensions began to unwind. He wandered up through the nearby chine, a narrow cleft in the hillside, to the old houses at the top, making his way along the chalky paths to savour the space and the ocean view. Such open vistas were favourites of his, ideal for soothing a troubled mind. The cliffs here were steeply picturesque and on a sunny day reminded well-travelled visitors of the Riviera or the Bay of Naples, and variously enticed Keats, Tennyson, and Prince Albert. The prince consort had just purchased Osborne House, on the other side of the island, to rebuild as a holiday palace for his growing family. Darwin tramped for miles, glad that his thoughts were taking a happier turn. The loss of his child and of his theory were not to be taken lightly. They both seemed less overwhelming when he was out in the fresh air.
Sometimes William accompanied him over the springy turf, identifying plants with a copy of George Bentham’s British Flora specially bought for the purpose, and naming them for his father’s edification. “Willy charged into the Compositae & Umbelliferae like a hero,” Darwin burst out in parental pride in a letter to Hooker one evening. William was about to go to Cambridge University with an entrance scholarship to Christ’s, his father’s old college—a kind of personal resurrection, Darwin told Fox sentimentally, even down to the academic cramming with a tutor beforehand and taking rooms on the same college staircase. Wildly ambitious for the future, he talked to his son about becoming a lawyer, “my dear future Lord Chancellor.” Tentatively, he explored the novelty of treating William as a grown-up equal. Less eager to participate in lord chancellor talk, but with the good humour that came naturally to all the Darwin boys, William bowed to the inevitable. This so-called equality mostly involved helping his father with his researches.
Almost immediately Darwin also began writing again, first at the King’s Head in Shanklin, and then more consistently for an hour or so every morning in a room in the villa in Sandown. He did not particularly wish to write: his thoughts were heavy. But it took his mind off his troubles and gave him something to do.
More to the moment, Hooker was pressing him for a proper scientific paper on natural selection, one which would set out his completed system and fulfill his claim to priority. Boldly, Hooker suggested that Darwin provide another article, of thirty pages or so, for the Linnean Society Journal, an abstract, as it were, of the long manuscript that Hooker knew was under way at Down. Affectionately, he put his scientific weight behind his friend and gave him a shove in the appropriate direction.
Anguished squeals shot out from the Isle of Wight. “I can hardly see how it can be made scientific for a Journal, without giving facts, which would be impossible.” “How on earth I shall make anything of an abstract in 30 pages of Journal I know not.”8 Undaunted, Hooker persisted. The Journal, he said stoically, would accommodate whatever Darwin supplied, 100 pages, or even 150. The reluctant author saw the necessity to agree.
Without knowing it, he began what was eventually to be the Origin of Species.
III
At home towards the middle of August 1858, the words poured out of him as if floodgates had broken. Hooker’s simple request, coupled with the high emotion of previous weeks, released years of pent-up caution. Darwin was not yet sure what form this writing would take—he called the manuscript an “abstract.” But he was bent on producing something for immediate publication. “I have resolved to do it, & shall do nothing till completed,” he told Fox. Clearly, the thought of Wallace energized and electrified him. “I am almost glad of Wallace’s paper for having led to this.”
Always a hard worker, he worked harder than he had ever done before. Day after day, he shut himself in his room surrounded by the clutter of a lifetime of research—notebooks, old sketches and essays, the unfinished manuscript that was interrupted by Wallace’s letter, flaps of paper poking out from the backs of books, a welter of pencil jottings, many of them illegible even to him, torn-up correspondence arranged in heaps according to the subject matter, and the silver snuff-box safely recharged in an accessible pocket. He did not use a desk. Instead, he sat with a board across his knee in a big upright armchair, the only chair in the house that accommodated his long legs, raised high off the ground by the addition of an ugly iron frame and castors. Day after day, he filletted, docked, and embellished his twenty-year-old project, bringing the full weight of mature understanding to bear on every word. Although the text was meant to be only an abstract, he wanted to make it as perfect as possible. There was no more room for postponing, no more hedging his bets.
And how he wrote. All the years of thought climaxed in these months of final insight. Alone in his study, secure in his downland ship, pampered by his wife, and insulated from the worries of the world, a sad and reticent man, so nearly preempted in his attempt to rewrite the story of nature, Darwin saw further and more clearly than ever before. Hooker’s pressure to be brief helped no end. His mind was lucid, his pen sharp. The steady support he received from friends and family was similarly sustaining.
&
nbsp; But the fire within came from Wallace. For so long, Darwin had been hemmed in by anxieties, always circumspect, outwardly conventional, and striving for scientific completeness—the search for flawlessness that marked him out from the start and which, in middle life, was driving him to exhaustion. Now every impediment was pushed aside. Whereas the process of being forestalled might have destroyed a lesser spirit, Darwin emerged resolute. Steel glinted. Wallace’s essay gave him the edge he needed. “You cannot imagine what a service you have done me in making me make this abstract,” he said to Hooker in October, “for though I thought I had got all clear, it has clarified my brains much, by making me weigh relative importance of the several elements.”9
Some of this newfound confidence probably lay in the way that his and Wallace’s Linnean Society paper was being received. Darwin had imagined the crisis of publication would be far worse than it was. The double paper appeared in the Linnean Society Journal (in the zoological section) in August 1858. During the next two or three months it was reprinted either in full or in part in several popular natural history magazines of the day.10 A number of people made their views known in letters, reviews, and journals. There were more notices than usually assumed.11
Richard Owen, for example, referred to the paper in his presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Leeds in September 1858, praising Wallace’s explanation of the way varieties replace one another, although hastily adding that there was no reason to think that this accounted for the origin of species.12 Owen’s published address had a wide circulation. The British Association deliberately aimed itself at the respectable, middle-class public who formed the larger community for science, and through the work of Owen and others promoted a form of intellectual engagement in which the grand design of the Creator usually played an obvious part. Indeed, the British Association was to become the theatre in which the evolutionary debate would be played out in front of the public for a decade or more. Yet, should he have wished, Owen could have been much harsher, more savage altogether, in immediately crushing the notion of evolution by natural selection. A longstanding acquaintance of Darwin’s, he was the leading figure in British natural history sciences, superintendent of the animal and plant collections at the British Museum, and a noted comparative anatomist. His philosophy of nature would ordinarily have predisposed him to dislike evolutionary proposals, for he advocated an idealist vision of the relationships between animals in which anatomical similarities were understood as expressions of the underlying plan of the Creator—although, here and there, he also put forward developmental connections as reflected in some of the more unusual reproductive cycles of lower animals.13 In his address, however, Owen seemed almost positively inclined. Another acquaintance of Darwin’s, the botanist Hewett Cottrell Watson, added an excitable word or two about the new theory to the next volume of his series on British plants, Cybele Britannica.14 And when extracts from Darwin’s and Wallace’s papers were reprinted in the popular magazine Zoologist, only a few correspondents raised their eyebrows. “Is this wise?” asked one country gentleman. “Is it in accordance with the spirit of modern science?” There was nothing here to worry Darwin unduly.
One reviewer pushed hard enough to chafe. Samuel Haughton, the professor of geology at Trinity College Dublin, sneered unpleasantly.
This speculation of Messrs. Darwin and Wallace would not be worthy of notice, were it not for the weight of authority of the names [i.e., Lyell’s and Hooker’s] under whose auspices it has been brought forward.… If it means what it says, it is a truism; if it means anything more, it is contrary to fact.15
Darwin copied this out to send to Hooker as an omen of things to come. Yet far from destroying his confidence, Haughton’s words seem to have tickled the anti-establishment recesses of his mind.
Elsewhere, and completely unknown to Darwin, the fellows of the Linnean Society received and read their number of the Journal without any evident alarm. Despite Haughton’s outburst, there were increasing numbers of thoughtful men and women in Britain and Ireland unfettered by the constraints of traditional natural theology, religious dogma, or biblical literalism—individuals who would still, nonetheless, regard themselves as responsible members of society and believers in some form of deity. A young naturalist called Alfred Newton, a junior fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge, sat up late into the night clutching his copy of the Journal. “I shall never forget the impression it made on me,” he wrote afterwards. “Herein was contained a perfectly simple solution of all the difficulties which had been troubling me for months.”16 Within the week he persuaded his college friend, a trainee ordinand, Henry Tristram, to agree, and Tristram prepared a short paper on the birds of North Africa for the influential ornithological journal Ibis. Rather like catching a disease, these two young men claimed they developed in the space of a few days “pure and unmitigated Darwinism.”
Gray and Hooker began mentioning the idea of natural selection in print, telling the botanical community that a more complete announcement from Darwin was on its way. Hooker admitted to Gray, “I must own that my faith is shaken to the foundation & that the sum of all the evidence I have encountered since I studied the subject is in favour of the origin of species by variation.” Gray replied in a similarly open-minded way. They were relieved to be able to talk about natural selection in public. By drawing them in while his ideas were still secret, Darwin had effectively tied their hands, neither allowing them any practical use of the theory in their work nor the freedom to discuss it with other naturalists. Released from this unvoiced commitment, Hooker published comments on Darwin’s and Wallace’s evolutionary views in the substantial essay on Tasmanian plants that he was compiling, part of a botanical catalogue that was delayed and not published until the closing months of 1859. There, he announced his support for “the ingenious and original reasonings and theories by Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace.” Before then he told Gray:
I am very busy with the Introductory Essay to Flora of Tasmania, a kind of composition I find most hard—I have to make large concessions to Darwin’s doctrines of “Natural Selection” and have altogether modified my opinion much on the subject of hybrids,—varieties—returning to parent form—& many other cardinal points.… Most thankful I am that I can now use Darwin’s doctrines—hitherto they have been secrets I was bound in honor to know, to keep, to discuss with him in private & to combat if I could in private—but never to allude to in public, & I had always in my writings to discuss the subjects of creation, variation &c &c as if I had never heard of Natural Selection—which I have all along known & feel to be not only useful in itself as explaining many facts in variation, but as the most fatal argument against “Special Creation” & for “Derivation” being the rule of all species.17
Unaware of Hooker’s prudence, Darwin read these Tasmanian proofs with mounting satisfaction. “You cannot imagine how pleased I am that the notion of natural selection has acted as a purgative on your bowels of immutability,” he said, more graphically than usual. In this book Hooker proposed that variation and transmutation might well be the answer plant taxonomists had been seeking for the botanical confusion they saw around them.18
Theological beliefs did not appear to hinder Gray’s evaluation of natural selection either. Gray referred to the Linnean Society papers in complimentary terms in the concluding part of his study of Japanese plants.19 Sheepishly admitting his pleasure in stirring things up, he also set out to agitate the members of a Harvard University science club in April 1859 by outlining Darwin and Wallace’s argument “partly to see how it would strike a dozen people of varied minds and habits of thought, and partly, I confess, maliciously to vex the soul of Agassiz with views so diametrically opposed to all his pet notions.”20 A small but significant part of the Massachusetts intellectual community, including Louis Agassiz, E. S. Dixwell, Joseph Lovering, and Benjamin Pierce, went away that night having been the first in America, after Gray, to hear of Darwin and Wallace’s work.
Gray was right about annoying Louis Agassiz. Agassiz was thoroughly irritated by the evening’s proceedings and impulsively added a jibe at Darwin and Wallace to his renowned Essay on Classification. The two Englishmen were foolish, Agassiz roundly declared, if they believed that a longer time would “do what 30,000 years has not done already.”
Agassiz did not regard Darwin and Wallace’s scheme with any degree of favour—and was not likely to. Ever since 1846, when he had emigrated to Boston from Switzerland, he had been the leading naturalist in America, a man with a world-wide scientific reputation, professor of zoology at Harvard University, charismatic, devout, and highly intelligent. At this point, in 1858 and 1859, he dominated American intellectual life. He was well known as believing that all living beings, including humans, were created by divine fiat. Species were thoughts in the mind of God, he announced in his Essay on Classification. Evolution in any form, whether it was Darwin’s or any other, was sacrilegious. This Essay on Classification, first published in 1857, and republished with anti-evolutionary comments in London in 1859, had been a sophisticated piece of biological thinking, in which he presented the philosophical reasons for regarding species as fixed and stable entities.21 All classification schemes would be useless, Agassiz argued, if species were always changing. Furthermore, the natural world was so delicately balanced, every organism depending on another in the web of what would come to be called ecological relationships, that all species must, by logical implication, remain constant. They must have been created at the same time, in the shape that they now hold, and all together. Agassiz sincerely believed that the natural world, and all its parts, was a beautiful and divinely inspired orchestral composition.
For these reasons, Agassiz and Darwin were evidently going to be implacably opposed on the question of evolution, not only in their divergent worldviews but in what might constitute the basic principles of biology. Despite their early friendly connections and a genuine regard for each other’s competence, Darwin regretted Agassiz’s metaphysical approach. “Utterly impracticable rubbish,” he had said when he read the Essay on Classification. He knew that he would never convince a man like Agassiz. So did Asa Gray. At that Harvard Science Club meeting, Gray deliberately confronted the main source of opposition that Darwin was ever going to encounter in America—an immensely powerful opposition, at that.