by Janet Browne
Last of all, Lyell nobly grappled with ideas that he found deeply disturbing. “Lyell’s thoughts,” said Charles Bunbury, his brother-in-law, “are at present very much engaged by Darwin’s speculations on the great question of species in natural history.”22 Bunbury said sympathetically that Lyell would not be able to give up the special status of mankind without a tremendous personal struggle.
Bunbury had few such problems himself. “However mortifying it may be to think that our remote ancestors were jelly fishes,” he confided to his diary after reading the Linnean Society paper, “it will not make much difference practically.”23
The same audacious thought crossed Huxley’s mind. “Wallace’s impetus seems to have set Darwin going in earnest,” he scribbled to Hooker in September 1858.
I am rejoiced to hear we shall learn his views in full at last. I look forward to a great revolution being effected. Depend upon it, in natural history, as in everything else, when the English mind fully determines to work a thing out, it will do it better than any other.24
Near and far, known and unknown, these men sensed that Darwin and Wallace had something to say. Even before his abstract was finished, Darwin’s personal project was taking on some of the trappings of a collective enterprise and gradually being picked up by a community of friends who operated in a well-organised scientific context that teemed with books and journals, private correspondence, societies, review journals, dinner parties, and speech-making occasions. Friendship was a potent weapon in the process of evaluating new ideas and making decisions. Darwin was far too sophisticated a thinker not to recognise and appreciate it.
At Christmas, he paused. “I never give more than one or two instances,” he moaned gently, “& I pass over briefly all difficulties & yet I cannot make my abstract shorter, to be satisfactory, than I am now doing.”25 He had written 330 folio pages and estimated he would require another 150 to 200 to finish. This was hardly an abstract. Gingerly, he began calculating the most efficient size of printer’s type for squeezing as many words as possible onto a page of the Linnean Society’s Journal. Equally gingerly, he tested the temperature of the publishing water at Kew. He asked Hooker how the Linnean editor would cope with a very long paper in the Journal; or what Hooker might feel if Darwin took it elsewhere. Sheet by sheet, Darwin’s abstract had turned into a monograph, and the monograph into a book. It looked to him as if a separately published volume was the only answer. “I am thinking of a 12mo volume like Lyell’s 4th or 5th edition of Principles,” he suggested.
Hooker understood the message only too clearly. He gave the abstract one last try, and asked if Darwin would like him to apply for a government grant so that the Linnean Society could issue a separate supplement.
Darwin rejected the offer. During the New Year holiday he gauged his text’s appeal among a throng of visiting relatives (“I think my book will be popular to a certain extent”) and decided that an independent volume would probably cover a publisher’s costs. If this turned out to be a miscalculation, he was “prepared to subsidise it” himself. He would not publish in the Linnean Society’s Journal. He would stand alone.
When at long last, late in January 1859, a kindly letter arrived from Wallace, Darwin burst out in a fever of relieved, impassioned activity. Without Wallace, he acknowledged gratefully, he could never have brought his work to such a pitch. Without Wallace’s handsome acquiescence, he could never have hoped to publish without being haunted by guilt. “He must be an amiable man,” he declared.
“Thank God I am in my last chapter but one,” he wrote back to Malaysia.26 He was convinced that he must make the “everlasting abstract” into an independent volume. After all the years of hesitation, and the upsets of the last six months, he was finally on course for the Origin of Species.
IV
From then until May 1859, when the manuscript was finished, he worked incessantly. He overhauled earlier chapters, completed remaining ones, and wrote a rousing conclusion. Again and again he murmured, “I fear I shall never be able to make it good enough.” Again and again, his friends answered questions, read sections of the text, wrote letters, and encouraged him. “It is a mere rag of an hypothesis with as many flaws & holes as sound parts,” he wrote to Huxley. “My question is whether the rag is worth anything?”27 Patiently, they supplied whatever he needed. “A sort of vague feeling comes over me that I have asked you all this before,” he said to Gray at one point. “If I have, I beg very many apologies.”
Now, with a book clearly in mind, Darwin’s overall focus became much sharper. Rigour and discipline pervaded his daily work. In practical terms, he cut down each pre-existing chapter from the big natural selection manuscript and relentlessly omitted all footnotes and citations of sources. Afterwards he regretted losing so much of the solid scientific evidence he had struggled to collect. Then he added and rearranged material to make a more compelling argument, couched in terms that were greatly improved by being compressed. Competition and catastrophe had shaken him out of his usual sense of himself. He felt closer to his material, more in tune with the raw brutality of nature, than ever before. Trenchantly cutting and weaving in this manner, he produced a five-hundred-page volume in thirteen months, an “abstract” of his theories only by way of leaving out documentation and lengthy provisos. The origin of his Origin was surgical indeed.
As a writer, too, he discovered unplumbed depths. His voice was in turn dazzling, persuasive, friendly, humble, and dark. Hardly daring to hope he might initiate a transformation in scientific thought, he nevertheless rose magnificently to the occasion. Being stuck in Down House was the best thing that could have happened to him. Pleasingly localised as his book was in manner, it reached out across national and chronological boundaries. His imagination soared beyond the confines of his house and garden, beyond his debilitating illnesses and the fragile health of his children. At his most determined, he questioned everything his contemporaries believed about living nature, calling forth a picture of origins completely shorn of the Garden of Eden. He abandoned the image of a heavenly clockmaker patiently constructing living beings to occupy the earth below. He dismissed what John Herschel devoutly called the “mystery of mysteries.” Darwin’s book implicitly laid claim to Adam and Eve, as time and again he showed how nature was cruel and full of blunders. The natural world has no moral validity or purpose, he argued. Animals and plants are not the product of special design or special creation. “I am fully convinced that species are not immutable,” he stated in the opening pages. No one could afterwards regard organic beings and their natural setting with anything like the same eyes as before. Nor could anyone fail to notice the way that Darwin’s biology mirrored the British way of life in all its competitive, entrepreneurial, factory spirit, or that his appeal to natural law unmistakably contributed to the general push towards secularisation and supported the claims of science to understand the world in its own terms. As well as rewriting the story of life, he was telling the tale of the rise of science in Victorian Britain.
Another kind of narrative emerged as well. Darwin wrote as he always wrote, in the same likable, autobiographical style he had developed during the Beagle voyage and brought alive in his Journal of Researches.28 Much later on, Francis Darwin said this pleasant style of writing was characteristic of his father in “its simplicity, bordering on naiveté, and in its absence of pretence.… 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.”29
This artless intimacy was familiar to generations of English readers through the pastoral writings of Gilbert White and gently humorous autobiographical stories like Tristram Shandy. Here Darwin spontaneously tapped into well-known and unthreatening literary genres. Although his theories might frighten, his style was thoroughly sympathetic and genial, creating a distinctive magic between author and reader. He appeared in his book just as he was in life—a reputable scien
tific gentleman, courteous, trustworthy, and friendly, who did not speak lightly of the momentous questions coming under his gaze, a champion of common sense, honest to his data, and scornful of “mere conjecture.” This humane style of writing was one of his greatest gifts, immensely appealing to British readers, who saw in it all the best qualities of their ancient literary tradition combined with contemporary gentlemanly values. It served him well during the controversial years to come. In particular, it defused any possible personal animosity. In effect, it made him.
And what a book it was. Few scientific texts have been so tightly woven, so packed with factual information and studded with richly inventive metaphor. Darwin’s literary technique has long been noted for echoing Great Expectations or Middlemarch in the complexity of the interlacing story lines and his ability to handle so many continuous threads at the same time. Darwin was crafting a lasting work of art.30 More than this, his imaginative powers were to captivate generations of readers. Modestly, he said only that his book could be read as “one long argument.”31
The structure of that argument was significant. Although Darwin deliberately made the steady procession of chapters look as if it reflected the day-to-day sequence of his research—giving an impression of a relatively uncomplicated progress from facts to ideas—the real story had been quite different. Natural selection was not self-evident in nature, nor was it the kind of theory in which one could say, “Look here and see.” Darwin had no crucial experiment that conclusively demonstrated evolution in action.32 He had no equations to establish his case. Everything in his book was to be words—persuasion, revisualisation, the balance of probabilities, the interactions between large numbers of organisms, the subtle consequences of minute chances and changes. Like Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology, he had to rely on drawing an analogy between what was known and what was not known, in Darwin’s instance by making a link between what took place in farmyards and what might be presumed to happen in the wild. He depended on probabilities. He relied on techniques in which the accumulation of factual examples progressively weakened a reader’s resistance. Case after case was “quite inexplicable on the theory of independent acts of creation,” and he called attention to some fifty or sixty biological phenomena that in his view simply could not be explained by special creation. Of course, underneath, he was aware that his data were inseparable from his theory—that neither could exist in his mind without the other. “How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!” he once wrote.33 And he understood that one of his greatest problems was to define and stabilise the very knowledge that he was attempting to introduce. These kinds of scientific argument were relatively untried in the nineteenth century.34 In an era when natural philosophers were consciously coming to rely on idioms of prediction, experiment, demonstration, and discovery, when accredited truths of nature were established by seeing and believing, Darwin’s approach was doubly unusual.35 He was inviting people to believe in a world run by irregular, unpredictable contingencies, as well as asking them to accept his solution for the simple reason that it seemed to work.
In this respect, the attention he lavished on facts was a highly effective procedure. Without accredited facts, he told himself, his argument would amount to little more than another Vestiges, or another version of Lamarck, a cautionary thought he had kept in mind ever since the day of Vestiges’ publication. Furthermore, the full weight of facts helped to distinguish his proposal from Wallace’s. And his emphasis on facticity, as it were, conformed to the most acceptable contemporary methods of science and eased the starkness of the theory he was proposing.36 As Darwin saw it, much of his originality and power to persuade thus lay in his mountain of scrupulously considered data. So he made sure that his readers would understand the years of effort that he had invested in establishing the accuracy of the information he presented. He cited by name the experts with whom he corresponded, often quoting from their letters. He described what he had seen with his own eyes during his own experiments. He authenticated the observations of unknown practical men by adding a few words of personal validation from himself or from others, characterising them as a “celebrated raiser of Hereford cattle,” or a “skilful pigeon-fancier.” He cited “careful observers,” and “the good observer.”
This sense of personal verification and adjudication was one of Darwin’s most visible traits as an author. Politely, gently, resolutely, he ushered his readers around his study, his garden, his circle of correspondents, his greenhouse, his social interactions with the landed gentry and their gamekeepers, and the learned societies he frequented and whose journals he studied. Underneath, he was making a programmatic statement about his authority to speak on the issue in hand and inviting his readers to trust him. The anonymous author of Vestiges had little such access to the opinions of experts. Nor had Wallace. Yet the naturalist at Downe had time in abundance, a world-wide series of contacts and introductions, and a sufficiently large income to indulge any amount of research. Through his facts, Darwin conveyed his high place in the structures of hierarchical, imperial England. He sought to surpass his rivals through the quality of the supporting evidence for his work.
V
In the first four chapters of this book—not yet called On the Origin of Species—he took infinite care to set out his wares according to the philosophical rules of the day.37 The sheer variability of organisms came first. “Breeders habitually speak of an animal’s organisation as something quite plastic, which they can model almost as they please,” he stated, and quoted Sir John Sebright, who claimed with respect to pigeons that “he would produce any given feather in three years, but it would take him six years to obtain head and beak.”38 To this, Darwin added a matching account of variability in wild animals and plants. All his notes about barnacle innards, wild horses’ stripes, primroses, and oxlips took their place. Privately, he characterised this as a “short & dry chapter.”39
The key point came next. There was an analogy, he claimed, between what a farmer or breeder could do and what might happen among wild animals and plants.40 His whole concept of natural selection rested on this analogy—an analogy between selective processes taking place under either “artificial” or “natural” conditions. As it turned out, his work was criticised on the validity of exactly this point (among many other future criticisms), not least by Wallace, who thought there could be no direct comparison between wild and domestic precisely because domestic animals had been removed from their natural environments.
In the pages that followed, Darwin explained what he meant. Across the green fields of Britain, all nature was at war with itself. The living world teemed with deadly competition and slaughter, the same elemental energies, red in tooth and claw, that Tennyson characterised in In Memoriam. “What war between insect and insect, between insects, snails, and other animals with birds and beasts of prey—all striving to increase, and all feeding on each other or on the trees or their seeds and seedlings, or on the other plants which first clothed the ground and thus checked the growth of the trees,” wrote Darwin.41 God’s harmony was an illusion. Unsure whether he would be believed, he produced a plethora of examples of strife in nature. Malthus’s principle of population was his justification.
It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms, for in this case there can be no artificial increase of food, and no prudential restraint from marriage.42
Limited resources, limited places in nature, and continued natural fecundity gave rise to a battle for survival. Well-adapted variants would be the only ones “selected” to survive. Here, said Darwin, was the origin of new species.
It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improv
ement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.43
In following chapters he worked his way through nearly every aspect of nineteenth-century biological thought, explaining how even the most intractable natural history puzzles could be explained—“descent being on my view the hidden bond of connexion which naturalists have been seeking.” In each area of thought he brought a wide range of phenomena under a single explanatory umbrella, unifying and giving fresh meaning to previously disparate data. This unexpected unification had from the start impressed him strongly and was still his main reason for believing in the truth of his theory. “My theory gives great final cause,” he had written as early as 1837, “I do not wish to say only cause, but one great final cause.”44
Embryology became intelligible—“Embryology rises greatly in interest, when we thus look at the embryo as a picture, more or less obscured, of the common parent-form of each great class of animals.” Darwin was proud of this part of his argument, which he asked Huxley to read before publication. “The facts seem to me to come out very strong for mutability of species,” he had told Hooker.45
Palaeontology, comparative anatomy, and taxonomy would also be transformed, he wrote in anticipation. The anatomical resemblances sought by taxonomists were not just abstract notions, nor were they the physical expression of some divine plan drawn up by the Creator, as Agassiz or Owen suggested. Instead, the resemblances were caused by genuine affinity. Furthermore, “descent” explained the existence of vestigial organs like the appendix in human beings—they were anatomical remnants left over by history. If comparative anatomists were to follow Darwin’s scheme, he said, the reason for finding rudimentary hind legs in snakes, for example, would soon become clear.