by Janet Browne
Ants did the trick too. Darwin very much wanted to discuss in the Origin of Species the way red ants enslaved the black ones that lived alongside them. What instinct led them to do this? Wandering along in the Moor Park conifer plantations one day, he came across a trail of red ants migrating from one nest to another about 150 yards away. Many of the ants carried cocoons, which greatly impeded their progress, and several lost their track and went off at a tangent. Others carried in their jaws captive black ants in order to restock the new nest with slaves, as he surmised.83 After a few small experiments in adding and removing cocoons (could there be a “blundering instinct”? he asked himself), Darwin chose one specific ant, identifiable by its cargo, and decided to follow it as far as it went.
Just then, a tramp came by. For a shilling, he agreed to help. George Darwin liked to tell the tale afterwards:
An ant was indicated & they both squatted down to watch their respective ants, and shuffled on from time to time as the ants proceeded. The place was the side of a country road. A carriage was heard approaching with the horses trotting, as it drew near the horses were slowed to a walk. My father kept telling the man “Now you mustn’t look up,” & so they both sat there looking intently at the ground & shuffling along alternately. My father’s ant came to a bare place just as the carriage was abreast of them, & [he] glanced up for an instant, & saw a whole carriage full of people gazing at the pair intently with their mouths open with astonishment at the apparently insane proceeding.84
Amused by his own passions, and late for dinner, Darwin entertained his fellow water-cure patients with his account of the ant and the carriage. The torments of writing the Origin were not so all-devouring that he failed to see the funny side of its author.
VIII
Yet who would publish such a book? Darwin consulted Lyell about possible publishers, making a specific trip to London for the purpose. He hoped to find a good general firm with a reliable niche in scientific affairs. Hesitantly, he asked Lyell if John Murray might be interested, the same John Murray who published all of Lyell’s books and who in 1845 had issued the second edition of Darwin’s Journal of Researches.85 Although Lyell witheringly referred to Murray behind his back as a mere “tradesman,” he thought this an excellent idea.86 He hurried round to Albermarle Street the next day, intending to pay Murray one of his most persuasive social calls. Murray was ideal for several reasons. First, he and Darwin had enjoyed a businesslike relationship over the Journal of Researches, which, in Murray’s sensible hands, ran to two additional reprints over the intervening years. Small royalty payments still arrived at Down House on a regular basis. Moreover, Murray was a man of parts, interested in science, especially geology and chemistry, and well accustomed to initiating shrewd publishing moves like the Home and Colonial Library, a series of edifying works for the middle classes, and the famous Handbooks, the first holiday guidebooks for Victorians, predating Baedekers by a few years. Murray personally supervised successive volumes on his travels through Europe.
More than this, however, Murray was rapidly becoming one of the more important scientific publishers of the Victorian era, astutely expanding the empire of his father, also called John Murray, who had once held sway over the glamorous circle of Byron, Moore, Croker, Lockhart, and Southey, and had established the firm’s literary and political magazine, the Quarterly Review. Even while Darwin deliberated, the younger Murray was moving into science, picking up a useful line in government publications from the India Office and Kew Gardens, and arranging to publish the annual reports of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He liked best to publish books of an instructive or improving nature, particularly travel narratives, always reliable sellers during the nineteenth century. Wiry, canny, and indefatigable, Murray was an expatriate Scot, an Anglican of low church persuasion and a staunch Tory: yet he opened his premises in Albermarle Street to authors of all shades of opinion, maintaining his father’s reputation for disinterested professionalism. A bit of controversy was never bad for business.
Murray agreed to Lyell’s plan. Flustered, Darwin insisted that Murray should read some of his chapters before making any formal agreement to publish. Murray might be so shocked that he would throw the manuscript in the fire at Albermarle Street as the elder John Murray did with Byron’s scandalous Memoirs. Yet within hours, Darwin’s butler, Parslow, was on the train to London bearing a brown paper package.
Even so, Darwin was agreeably forestalled by a contract arriving in the post before this reading could be arranged. Privately, Darwin may have wished that Lyell had been a little less convincing—a book on the natural origins of species was not likely to sell well, he thought ruefully, and Murray might easily suffer a loss. Murmurs of indecision emerged from Downe. “Some parts must be dry & some rather abstruse,” he told Murray on 2 April 1859. “Forgive me for adding that if my book does prove a failure you will not find me of an avaricious nature.” He promised to keep the length down to an economical four hundred pages. He volunteered to pay for some of the proof corrections. He wondered if the accounts might look more attractive if he purchased one hundred copies for himself at cost.
Diplomatically, the publisher steered Darwin through these conflicting feelings. Nor was Murray as completely swayed by Lyell’s advocacy as Darwin feared. Murray sent the manuscript of the Origin of Species out to be refereed by two of his most valued friends, George Frederick Pollock, his father’s former adviser, and Whitwell Elwin, the editor of the Quarterly Review. Although Murray probably never seriously contemplated rejecting it, the process was significant in helping him assess the book’s likely commercial impact and the financial considerations that would determine the terms of his contract with Darwin.
Murray evidently read parts of the work for himself as well, for he remarked frankly to Pollock that he thought Darwin’s theory was as absurd as contemplating a fruitful union between a poker and a rabbit. Pollock countered by saying that the book would be much discussed. Pollock said he admired the way “Mr. Darwin had so brilliantly surmounted the formidable obstacles which he was honest enough to put in his own path.”87
Much more critical comments came from Murray’s second reader, Whitwell Elwin. Elwin was a cultivated man who lived a dual life as a high-profile literary editor and a vicar of a rural parish in Norfolk. His tastes were eclectic, a useful talent when obliged to write articles to fill sudden gaps in the Quarterly Review, and they enabled him to mix easily with scientific and literary authors alike. He was only forty-three when he read the Origin of Species manuscript, younger and more a man of the world than Darwin, and, as an ordained priest, well attuned to the theological movements of the day. At that time he was working on a refutation of Baden Powell’s book The Order of Nature, in which Powell attacked the idea of miracles, while also abridging David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels for a popular edition. His verdict had always been essential to Murray, his approval vital.
Elwin did not approve. The vicar in him responded, not the cosmopolitan literary Londoner. Darwin’s text was a “wild and foolish piece of imagination.”88 Everything about it distressed him. “At every page I was tantalized by the absence of proofs.… It is to ask the jury for a verdict without putting the witnesses into the box.… For an outline it is too much, & for a thorough discussion of the question it is not near enough.”89
Elwin recommended that Darwin should confine himself to pigeons. If the book was about pigeons, he said, it would be reviewed in every journal in the kingdom. Such a book would be a “delightful commencement.” All the rest should be abandoned.
Darwin snorted in disbelief. “I have done my best,” he informed Murray decisively. “Others might, I have no doubt, done the job better [sic], if they had my materials; but that is no help.” Luckily, Murray agreed. He put Elwin’s opinion to one side, and accepted the manuscript. Darwin told Murray to expect the first six chapters during the following week. Both of them had gone too far to be halted by a few words of caution.
/> IX
The summer of 1859 passed in a blaze of proof-reading. All Darwin’s doubts about his writing style returned with a vengeance. “There seems to be a sort of fatality in my mind leading me to put at first my statement and proposition in a wrong or awkward form,” he reflected afterwards.90 He blackened the galleys with corrections, inserted new information wholesale, and rewrote entire paragraphs. “On my life no nigger with lash over him could have worked harder at clearness than I have.”
Emma helped whenever she could. She read the Origin in full during the proof stage and loyally tried to help her husband convey his thoughts accurately to readers. There is no evidence that Emma tried to censor his text. On the contrary, the two of them discussed awkward sentences in the evenings, until they found a form that captured what he was really trying to say.
Lyell studied the proofs while he travelled round the continent on his summer holidays. And Georgina Tollet, a longstanding friend of Emma’s from Staffordshire, came to stay and worked them over for style. Darwin barely mentioned this feminine assistance, no doubt considering it a private affair through which he could ensure that his grammar and spelling were adequate; “this lady being excellent judge of style is going to look out for errors for me,” he told Murray. Nevertheless, she helped him tighten his argument. “Georgina Tollet came last Sat.,” Emma said to William. “She reads a great deal of Papa’s MS & is very useful to him in making him explain things that are not quite clear.”91
Hidden female assistance like this was commonplace for the period. Though Darwin regularly asked friends like Hooker and Lyell for advice on inaccuracies, tone, and style, he never requested male colleagues to dedicate themselves to routine editorial tasks. At that time, too, manuscripts were hardly ever corrected by staff at a publishing house. Editing was mostly carried out at home by the authors’ wives, sisters, daughters, and nieces—by a roomful of readily available household experts. This feminine, home-based input has only recently been recognised as a significant factor in Victorian publishing history.
Certainly Darwin knew he needed assistance. “I find the style incredibly bad, & most difficult to make clear & smooth.… How I could have written so badly is quite inconceivable, but I suppose it was owing to my whole attention being fixed on general line of argument, & not on details.”92 Georgina Tollet earned her eventual gift of a silver vase. “One lady who has read all my M.S. has found only 2 or 3 obscure sentences,” Darwin proudly announced. He was annoyed to hear from Kew that Mrs. Hooker thought one chapter of the Origin very unclear in places.93
There were all the customary setbacks and crises of authorship to deal with as well. Hooker inadvertently destroyed part of Darwin’s chapter on geographical distribution, absent-mindedly putting the handwritten manuscript in the drawer at home reserved for his children’s drawing paper. The pages were irretrievably scribbled over by the time Hooker remembered. “I have the old M.S.,” Darwin said after this confession. “Otherwise the loss would have killed me!” Hooker could only groan to Huxley, “I feel brutified, if not brutalised, for poor D. is so bad that he could hardly get steam up to finish what he did. How I wish he could stamp and fume at me—instead of taking it so good-humouredly as he will.”94 Hooker compensated by doing an exceptionally thorough job in commenting on the remaining pages, while Frances Hooker performed valiant feats on the English. But Huxley’s unsympathetic cackle came straight from Victorian nursery rhyme. “What do you say to standing on your head in the Gardens for one hour per diem for the next week?”95 The Origin of Species was much more of a collaborative effort than has ever been suspected.
Interruptions there were. There was the summer cricket match at Down House to organise, an annual contest between gentlemen and players, loosely interpreted as the big houses against the villagers (married against single, in later years), and played on the large home meadow owned by the Darwins. Once again Parslow showed his versatility as a scientist’s butler by manoeuvring his young gentlemen into an unassailable position. George Darwin, then aged fourteen, and some of the teenaged Lubbocks were useful batsmen. Erasmus came down from London for the social side of the occasion. “Our cricket match went off brilliantly & Mr Parslow’s party beat Mr Reeves’ all to nothing,” Emma told William after the match. “Aunt Susan, Uncle Ras & Uncle Hensleigh came on Sat but unluckily your father had an attack yesterday & was in bed most of the day, he is tolerable now but is going back to Moor Park tomorrow, as he has been failing some little time.”96
Drama over the children’s governesses added to his tension. Ineffective, melancholy Miss Pugh left the household early in 1859. Henrietta Darwin, aged sixteen, recounted how she would sometimes sit at meals with tears running down her face, and even Emma noticed her eccentricities wearing the family down. Emma located another placement for Miss Pugh (with the help of the Hookers) and promised her an annual holiday at Darwin’s expense.
Then Madame Grut arrived, fresh from Switzerland, ready to teach French and German conversation. Henrietta considered her unbearable and made no pretence of hiding her feelings. In the end, Darwin sacked her—an event he disliked at the best of times, and on this occasion fraught with other grievances. Henrietta viewed the departure as a personal triumph. “Solemn events have happened,” she informed her older brother William.
This is how it came about. On Monday at breakfast Mama said very civilly that she wanted some alteration in Horace’s lessons. Mrs Grut was evidently miffed at that, & then I said I thought s’eloigner wasn’t to ramble, very mildly, & that miffed her again & she made some rude speech or other “Oh very well if I knew better than the dictionary” … Nothing more came of it then & all went smooth till I went up to my German lesson in the evening. When I came in I saw there was the devil in her face, well she scolded the children a bit & then sat down by me, when I showed her my lesson (a bit of very bad French) she said, if I knew better than she did it was no use her teaching me & so on & so on, till it came to a crisis, & she worked herself up into a regular rage.… I left the room then, & went downstairs to tell my injuries. When Papa & Mama heard all about it they settled she shd go at once, so Papa wrote her a letter telling her she shd have her £33 & nothing more.… then Papa was to go upstairs & deliver the letter.… Papa got such a torrent, telling him he was no gentleman, & white with passion all the time, wanting to know what she had done, what he had to accuse her of—telling him he was in a passion—she would give him time to think.… We had a very flustered tea, & all evening we sat preparing for the worst, what we shd do if she refused to go out of the house etc. However she did turn out much milder & sent us a letter to say she wd go on Wednesday.97
After Madame Grut’s departure, Miss Pugh returned for a few weeks and then the invaluable Miss Thorleys, Catherine and Emily, came in sequence as temporary replacements. Eventually a Miss Latter was hired, whom Darwin called “a very clever lady.”98 She fitted in well enough to last until 1860, when she moved on to become a mistress in a school in the neighbourhood.
A few paternal pleasures eased in with the late-summer sunshine. Darwin was pleased by the boyish fervour with which Francis, Leonard, and Horace (aged eleven, nine, and eight) took up beetle collecting, and told Fox how his blood boiled with the old ardour when the boys captured a small but unusual ground beetle, Licinus silphoides, in the garden—“a prize unknown to me.” Francis remembered Darwin’s enthusiasm for a long time afterwards. “I have a vivid recollection of the pleasure of turning out my bottle of dead beetles for my father to name, and the excitement, in which he fully shared, when any of them proved to be uncommon ones.”99 Remembering his own thrill at seeing his name in print at an early age, Darwin wrote a short letter about the beetles to the Entomologist’s Weekly Intelligencer, a cheap news-sheet, as if it were from the boys. “We three very young collectors,” it began and was signed Francis, Leonard, and Horace Darwin. It announced the capture of Licinus silphoides.100
X
Towards the end, the constant pressure of
correcting proofs frayed his nerves. Perhaps the book was coming too close to publication for comfort. Modesty and ambition fought for the upper hand, reticence and impatience rubbed uncomfortably together. He did not court publicity, he told Fox. Fame was not what drove him. “If I know myself, I work from a sort of instinct to try to make out truth.” Yet this was only part of the story. Any truth that lay at the bottom of his theories would be a barren kind of truth, he thought, if it remained unknown to the scientific public. For this reason he remained concerned that the forthcoming book would be only an abstract, deprived of the evidence that he regarded as a necessary part of his argument, stripped of all his properly cautious scientific caveats—and he promised himself that he would eventually publish the whole of his long manuscript.
Nor was his customary desire for privacy an easy companion for the self-promotion and exposure the forthcoming book would undoubtedly require. “I am becoming as weak as a child,” he groaned to Hooker, “miserably unwell & shattered.” Vomiting started again. “I have been so wearied & exhausted of late,” he complained in September 1859. “I have for months doubted whether I have not been throwing away time & labour for nothing.” He was in an absorbed, slavish, overworked state, he told Fox in another letter. “My abominable volume … has cost me so much labour that I almost hate it.”
Supportively, Darwin’s friends rallied round. Lyell went out of his way to encourage and assist. It was not yet clear to Darwin whether Lyell would accept the concept of natural selection, for Lyell was genuinely worried by the spiritual consequences of what Darwin was proposing. He was finding it hard to go “the whole orang,” as he sighed to Huxley. Yet evolutionists “cannot be pooh-poohed & ought not to be so.”101 Darwin and Lyell exchanged many letters during this period. “I am foolishly anxious for your verdict,” Darwin admitted. “I regard your verdict as far more important in my own eyes & I believe in eyes of world than of any other dozen men [sic].”