by Janet Browne
Unable to resist a small experiment during one walk, Darwin transferred a few red ants from one nest into another. “I pass my time chiefly in watching the ants,” he wrote to his son William, “& I find that though many thousands inhabit each hillock, each seems to know all its comrades, for they pitch unmercifully into a stranger brought from another ant-hill.”65 He thought these red ants were the slave-making species Formica sanguinae, and told Emma he was going to send a specimen to the British Museum for confirmation. “I had such a piece of luck at Moor Park,” he mentioned to Hooker a few days later. “I found the rare Slave making ant, & saw the little black niggers in their master’s nests.” Up until then he had thought the custom of making slaves—the brutal practice that so incensed him on H.M.S. Beagle when first landing in Brazil—was confined to the human race. Yet he was forced to acknowledge its wider existence after opening up red ants’ nests and finding captured black ants in each. “Any one may well be excused for doubting the truth of so extraordinary and odious an instinct as that of making slaves,” he would write disapprovingly in the Origin of Species.66 His understanding of these biological relationships was probably influenced by his former colonial experiences. Recalling the horrors he encountered in South America, he regarded the red ants’ behaviour as enslavement rather than any comparable social structure such as symbiosis or co-operation. He felt very uncomfortable providing biological parallels for human practices he found abhorrent.
Some of the most intensely private moments of Darwin’s middle life came during these solitary walks at Moor Park, moments when he drew fresh inspiration from the beauty of his surroundings and recaptured an uncomplicated joy in nature. He needed these moments more and more. Behind the questioning philosopher lay both an anxious pedant and a sensitive soul, different sides of his character clashing awkwardly as he forced himself to continue writing. He was a driven man. Only an impending physical collapse could force him to slow down. Yet like many driven men he felt uneasy when peace and quiet were actually made available. He could not rest. He could not stop. And evolutionary theory in itself brought him to a knife edge. His mature years were wrapped up in describing the black forces beneath nature’s surface. Sometimes he recoiled from seeing nature the way his selection theory demanded. “What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low & horridly cruel works of nature!” he once exclaimed to Hooker. “My God how I long for my stomach’s sake to wash my hands of it—for at least one long spell.”67 Often he worried about the sheer magnitude, the philosophical effrontery, of what he was proposing. He was rewriting the greatest story ever told, offering his contemporaries another Eden, a secular testament for the times. The tension partly expressed itself in his health.
Not surprisingly, his religious position troubled him too. He found his beliefs were increasingly difficult to pin down, sometimes starkly uncompromising, sometimes genuinely responsive to the idea of a deity of sorts. At this time of his life, he said he felt torn both ways. Although he wrote with conviction about a godless universe, he retrospectively thought that while he was writing the Origin of Species he probably retained some residual faith: enough that he deserved “to be called a Theist.”68 At least he knew what duty was, he said to Emma. He had no desire to present himself in his book as an outright atheist. He did not wish to slap some of his oldest friends in the face.
He worried about Emma’s feelings as well. He sensed that she was concerned about the implications of his views, not so much in the wider cultural sphere, although it seems likely that public strife within the Victorian church perplexed and disappointed her, but much more in the immediate family context. She knew all about his theories. For a long time now she had recognised these ideas as an integral part of his existence and accepted them in much the same way as she accepted his illnesses or the outlandish sequence of his scientific hobby-horses, barnacles, yew-trees, pigeons, and all. They were part of her married life. They amused her at times. She was apprehensive about them at others. Always, she saw how they kept him occupied and fulfilled. Certainly she never prevented his engagment with far-ranging intellectual explorations or hampered his publications because of private disapproval. She never stopped him seeing Huxley, for example, a man who would come to be regarded by some as the devil’s disciple. Perhaps she prayed for his soul on Sundays—the letters she wrote him soon after their marriage displayed that likelihood in tender detail. Affection carried the day.
In turn, Darwin knew he could depend on her good sense, her unflappable kindly nature. He was sure that she would support him, no matter what. But it was precisely because of this that he recoiled from exposing her to the full consequences of his own bleak universe. The steady, married love that had grown up between them guaranteed that he would not deliberately hurt her feelings. In a world where the cold stones of graveyards haunted the memory, Darwin realised that he might easily be accused of taking away from her and countless other men and women all hope of heavenly reunion with loved ones, all consolation in the idea of an afterlife.69 In the kindest possible way, he tried to compromise. He had to say what he needed to say in the Origin of Species. But he backed away from any obvious confrontation with the church or with those who were sincere believers. It seems probable that he avoided talking to her about it.
At Moor Park some of the conflict was soothed. “The weather is quite delicious,” he told Emma in April 1858.
Yesterday after writing to you I strolled a little beyond the glade for an hour & half & enjoyed myself—the fresh yet dark green of the grand Scotch firs, the brown of the catkins of the old Birches with their white stems & a fringe of distant green from the larches, made an excessively pretty view.—At last I fell asleep on the grass & awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me, & squirrels running up the trees & some Woodpeckers laughing, & it was as pleasant a rural scene as ever I saw, & did not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had been formed.70
This peaceful country-based cure took him back to a time when his thoughts were altogether less stressful.
VII
During these interludes at Moor Park, Darwin’s old conviviality revived too. He appreciated the diverse company gathered for medical treatment, writing little character sketches of the other patients for Emma and the children’s entertainment, and as often as not persuading unsuspecting guests to answer natural history questions for him. A Hungarian attaché to the embassy in Paris promised to send him information about native breeds of horses in Budapest. On another visit a young Irishman taught him “some capital billiard moves.” He joked with Lady Drysdale about their mutual compulsion to get to railway stations hours before the train was due to leave (“please to tell Lady Drysdale that I reached the station only 14 minutes before the train started & I should like to know when she will ever have such a triumph as that”); and discussed an immense range of novels with Mrs. Lane, who turned out to be as devoted to the light reading supplied by Mudie’s Circulating Library as Darwin unashamedly was. “It often astonished us what trash he would tolerate in the way of novels,” lamented his son George later on. “The chief requisites were a pretty girl & a good ending.”71
Darwin certainly appreciated the undemanding qualities of the fiction stocked by Charles Edward Mudie. Five guineas’ annual subscription to this lending library brought him a parcel of up to six recently published books for borrowing every month—fiction and nonfiction books appropriate for middle-class drawing rooms all over the United Kingdom.72 The choice was not always the customer’s. Mudie’s staff supplied whatever was new and available, and then filled up the order with miscellaneous works of a solidly respectable nature. Darwin found this no particular hardship. The firm’s backlist was crammed with contemporary memoirs, history, belles-lettres, science, religious works, travel, and adventure, as well as fiction in all categories; and much of Darwin’s general reading was obtained from Mudie’s nonfiction shelves. He was also a member of the London Library, a private library club th
at similarly dispatched titles by post to country subscribers.
The essence of Mudie’s appeal lay in the word “select,” for the firm’s owner excluded topics and authors that were deemed unsuitable: no longer would the head of a Victorian family have to worry about the blushes of his womenfolk during unsupervised reading. While every Literary and Philosophical Society in every provincial town ran a lending library of sorts, and books themselves were getting cheaper to buy by the year, large centralised concerns like Mudie’s, which lent, on subscription, all the most desirable publications, were already sweeping the board. With his vast range of stock and efficient distribution system that expanded dramatically through the century to encompass the furthest reaches of empire, Mudie probably did far more to educate middle-brow tastes than any poet or philosopher. The firm sent boxes of books to nearly every corner of the globe and to nearly every provincial bookshop in Britain, sometimes directly to subscribers like Darwin, or increasingly on a franchise basis, contributing in a businesslike way to the creation of the mass reading audience that typified the Victorian era. Every book that Mudie purchased was one that people wanted to read. Every copy was sent out on loan five, ten, or twenty times until its popularity waned and it was placed on the backlist or sold in the secondhand department. The depot in London was beseiged by readers hoping to be first at the counter for the next installment of Orley Farm or Adam Bede. In this regard, Mudie was one of the first bookselling magnates to build his business on an audience-led response to literature. As a result, his financial power over publishers was supreme, at least during the middle decades of the century, and even leading figures like Eliot, Kingsley, Thackeray, Bulwer Lytton, Tennyson, and Trollope on occasion wrote specifically in the three-volume format he required for his list.73 Books were purchased by Mudie in bulk directly from the publisher, on his own terms. Three-volume novels (three-deckers or yellow-backs) became his preferred item, and these constituted nearly half the stock of the giant depot in New Oxford Street. A million volumes on the shelves, declared the advertisements.
Darwin liked these three-decker novels. He found them relaxing, barely registering the titles in their seamless web of deserted sweethearts, secret weddings, wicked cousins, mistaken identities, and the age-old quests for love and passion. His critical faculties were suspended. In these pages he did not have to examine the accuracy of facts or delve far beneath the surface: the books did not require any of the penetrating scrutiny he employed for other kinds of reading matter. If he was given a scientific thought to analyse, his mind was alert, clear, and concise. But given a character in a novel, his responses were entirely predictable. The sillier the story the better, said his children pityingly.74 At home, Emma would read such novels out loud at regular intervals while he lay on the sofa and idly smoked a cigarette. If he drifted off to sleep there was no difficulty in catching up with the plot. At Moor Park, he and Mrs. Lane swopped their thoughts about the latest offerings. He took a vivid interest in the plots and characters, treating them like real events and real people—traits amusingly derided by his wife and children but nevertheless showing his ability for appreciative immersion in the lives of those men and women who interested him. For this reason he liked long-running serials or family sagas in which he could worry about a heroine’s future almost as if she were a daughter. He felt that looking at the end of a novel was a particularly feminine vice; and would, with a laugh, insist that his tastes put him quite beyond the literary pale.75 “He especially enjoyed a pretty heroine,” said Francis. “In this he resembled Uncle Ras who was so much influenced by the heroine that he was a very untrustworthy guide in the matter of novels.”76
Not everything was easy reading. Darwin paid intelligent attention to authors of the day, receiving from Mudie’s titles by George Eliot, Bulwer Lytton, a Trollope or two, and Charles Kingsley. He engaged with the literary works enjoyed by Emma, Erasmus, his sisters, and the Wedgwoods.
Romantic novels occupied him in other ways too. When his niece Julia Wedgwood (Fanny and Hensleigh Wedgwood’s daughter, by then around twenty-five years old) wrote a novel in 1858, called Framleigh Hall, Darwin enthusiastically threw himself into the dual role of literary critic and supportive uncle. Julia’s parents disapproved of the book. They were puzzled by her disagreeable hero and depressing plot, a sort of anti-romantic novel, if truth be told. Her sisters merely dismissed it as boring. Darwin and Erasmus were the only ones in the family to provide Julia with the encouragement for which she yearned, and she brought the manuscript with her to Down House to consult Darwin in preference to her father. Rashly she showed her father the next novel, An Old Debt, published in 1859 under the pen-name Florence Dawson. “Pray write something more cheerful the next time,” she was told.77 Thereafter Darwin felt protective about Julia’s literary career, successfully combining the indulgence of a close relative with the intellectual attention he usually reserved for male colleagues. Julia, he was beginning to find, interested him greatly.
However, as Darwin confessed to Mrs. Lane and other understanding female friends, most of the acclaimed contemporary classics “cheated” him of his happy ending.
Good humour also usually warmed his blood sufficently to flirt gently from time to time with ladies visiting Moor Park for the waters. Not quite fifty years old, he enjoyed the company of Georgiana Craik, the twenty-seven-year-old daughter of George Craik, professor of English literature at Queen’s University, Belfast. She was often taking the cure at the same time as he was. In 1857 Georgiana Craik published a sentimental novel of the kind Darwin favoured, Riverston, and she planned others for the future. Darwin gallantly explained natural selection to her over dinner. Miss Craik objected by asking why all the intermediary stages were not found in the fossil record, a response that he jotted down as a good example of criticism he was likely to receive. “I like Miss Craik very much, though we have some battles & differ on every subject.”
Georgiana Craik never put Moor Park into any of her novels, or Darwin either. But her future sister-in-law the novelist Dinah Mulock Craik based one of her short stories on experiences clearly related to a visit to the Lanes round about this time. The relaxed, cultivated air at Moor Park, thought Dinah Mulock, encouraged romance, and she wrote a catchy little tale about a water doctor and two male patients vying for the attentions of an elegant widow.78 It was no surprise to Moor Park readers that the charming doctor won the heroine or that sexual attraction emerged as the best medicine.
Oddly enough, in real life, Dr. Lane innocently contributed something to the same highly charged atmosphere, although he later tried to suppress all records of the incident. In 1858, a few months after Darwin first joined the Moor Park clientele, one of Lane’s female patients claimed an adulterous affair with the doctor and published sensational extracts from her diary in a daily newspaper. The patient’s outraged husband promptly filed for divorce, a legal action only made possible by the divorce reforms of 1857. The case scorched through the Times for weeks in 1858, ending only when the lady’s diary of assignations was judged to be completely imaginary—an instance of hysteria.79 Lane fought hard to save his professional reputation, embarrassed by the knowledge that prospective patients could read in the Times that Dr. Lane “paid great attention to all the ladies.”80 Loyally, Lane’s regulars continued to support him. No less loyal, Darwin was nonetheless transfixed by the newspaper details. He met at Moor Park another purported lover who was cited in the case (“a very sensible nice young man”), and wrote to Fox in astonishment about the woman’s mental state, enclosing a clipping from the Times. He was glad to see Lane stoically living down the ensuing scandal.
Possibly Darwin could see where some of the dangers lay. While he was at Lane’s water-cure he met a Miss Mary Butler, another patient of Lane’s, who charmed him with bright anecdotal chatter, piling her salt beside her plate on the dining table as he did, and delivering a lively series of unbelievable ghost stories. According to his son Francis, Darwin was always susceptible to a pre
tty woman with plenty to say. When he talked to a woman who pleased and amused him, the combination of raillery and deference in his manner, said Francis, was delightful to see.81 Darwin explained natural selection to Mary Butler as well, and undertook to supply her with the autographs of famous naturalists, simply tearing off the signatures from letters when he got home. Sitting between her and Miss Craik, he protested happily that he did not know what he might not come to put in his book: “honeysuckles turning into oaks would be a mere trifle & new species springing up on every railway embankment.”82 Mary Butler’s company made Darwin’s days at the water-cure pass by much more lightly, full of the concentrated intimacy that shared attendance at medical institutions is likely to generate. He welcomed her attention, was flattered at being thought interesting. At least two of his visits were deliberately timed to coincide with her schedule.
In May 1859, when the Origin of Species manuscript was finished, Darwin shot off to Moor Park for a week of rest and hydropathy. The last chapter caused him “bad vomiting” and “great prostration of mind & body.” He went again in July with the sole intention of driving species out of his head. His list of “Things for a week” indicated that he took the plan seriously—stationery, cigars, snuff, “book to read,” shawls, towels, and a hair glove for the invigorating rubs Parslow gave him after the baths. He took Trollope (The Bertrams), Kingsley (Yeast), Bulwer Lytton (The Caxtons), and the first volume of Eliot’s Adam Bede. He also included Dinah Mulock’s romantic melodrama Agatha’s Husband, ideal for filling the mind with inconsequential thoughts. “Entire rest & the douche & Adam Bede have together done me a world of good,” he said on his return.