by Janet Browne
Lyell responded in the way he knew best. He praised Darwin’s forthcoming book at a public lecture during the British Association meeting in September 1859, not only giving the book advance publicity but also indicating that he would stand by Darwin in the face of the world. This meeting was in Aberdeen, and Lyell had been invited to meet the prince consort, the honorary president of the British Association that year, during it. He breathlessly recorded for his ladies at home every detail of his lunch at Balmoral, naturally placing himself at the centre of events, although Queen Victoria remembered it rather differently, noting in her diary that the day was burdened with “four weighty omnibuses laden with philosophers & savants.”102
In his lecture Lyell talked about the striking new evidence about the early history of mankind that was emerging from the silts and gravel beds of northern France. Two English naturalists, Hugh Falconer and Joseph Prestwich, were among the first to uncover Stone Age tools—worked flints—that seemed to push the first appearance of human beings back to a time contemporaneous with extinct fossil mammals. Such an early start for humans created many puzzles, not least in practical geological terms. Yet excavations in Abbeville and other localities in France were revealing examples of these apparent tools embedded in the same deposits as the bones of extinct animals. Lyell summarised the results for his British Association audience, which also provided him with a suitable opening for a few words on Darwin. The forthcoming book, Lyell declared, would throw “a flood of light on many classes of phenomena connected with the affinities, geographical distribution, and geological succession of organic beings, for which no other hypothesis has been able, or has even attempted to account.”103
For a pre-publication salvo this could hardly be bettered. It looked to Darwin as if Lyell would go with him a good part of the way. “I do thank you for your euloge at Aberdeen,” he said appreciatively. “Now I care not what the universal world says.… You would laugh if you knew how often I have read your paragraph, & it has acted like a little dram.”104
Eventually, the page proofs came to an end. Darwin added two longish quotations as epigraphs to the volume, one audaciously taken out of context from William Whewell’s treatise on astronomy, suggesting that God worked through general scientific laws rather than through direct intervention, and another from Francis Bacon on the nobility of the search for knowledge. No man could search too far, he transcribed from Bacon feelingly, and dated it “Down, Bromley, Kent, October 1st, 1859.”105
At the last minute he adjusted the title according to Murray’s recommendation. Darwin’s first suggestion was rather too complicated: “An Abstract of an Essay on the Origin of Species and Varieties Through Natural Selection.” Common sense surely suggested to Murray that the words “abstract,” “essay,” and “varieties” should go, and that “natural selection,” a term with which Murray thought the public would not be familiar, ought to be explained. The agreed-upon title was, however, hardly less cumbersome—On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
To this title Darwin attached his name—an obvious but crucial step. By putting his name to his theory, he categorically distanced his book from the anonymous Vestiges, still the most well-known evolutionary tract, and, if necessary, from the flourishing genre of scurrilous, nameless political pamphlets that attacked the Victorian state. Darwin was no radical pamphleteer hiding behind a veil of anonymity. His whole style of scientific endeavour was invested in properly acknowledged authorship. His name was one that could be published and trusted, and his book was intimately bound up with its author’s identity. On the title page, a list of his public credentials followed—his M.A. from Cambridge University and membership of learned societies. Wealth, class, education, the respect of his peers, and a recognisable code of gentlemanly conduct were here fused with his views and with himself. In so doing, he symbolically took full responsibility for his work.
On 1 October 1859 he recorded in his diary, “Finished proofs,” and calculated that the writing process had taken thirteen months and ten days to complete. On 2 October he was off. Exhausted and sickly, he made his way to a water-cure establishment in Ilkley, at the foot of the Yorkshire moors. Edward Lane and Moor Park were not doing him so much good as usual. This time he decided he needed dramatic intervention. “I am worn out & must have rest.… Hydropathy & rest—perhaps that will make a man of me.”106
“Is there any chance of your being at Ilkley in beginning of October?” he wrote tentatively to Mary Butler. “It would be rather terrible to go into the great place & not know a soul. If you were there I should feel safe & home-like.”107
chapter
3
PUBLISH AND BE DAMNED
N THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES was published in London on 24 November 1859, while Darwin was taking the water-cure at Ilkley. It was a very ordinary-looking volume bound in sturdy green cloth, 502 pages long, and somewhat expensively priced at fourteen shillings, not nearly as gaily decked out as Murray’s red-and-gilt version of Darwin’s earlier Journal of Researches and nothing like the pocket-sized duodecimo Darwin had at first proposed.1
The author’s serious intent was obvious. There were no eye-catching natural history illustrations, no pedigree fatstock emblazoned in gilt on the cover, not even a frontispiece of an evocative prehistoric scene as there might be today in a book about evolution. For a volume that described the teeming fecundity of life on earth, the pages were curiously devoid of living beings. But it was a fair specimen of nineteenth-century typography, well printed on decent paper, and serviceably bound. The book’s unassuming demeanour suited its author perfectly. “I am infinitely pleased & proud at the appearance of my child,” Darwin told Murray when his advance copy arrived in Yorkshire. “I am so glad that you were so good as to undertake the publication of my book.”2
Unassuming or no, this book transformed his life. Of course, he expected controversy, although even in his gloomiest moments he could not have begun to imagine the convulsions of public opinion, praise, and denigration that would follow. From the start, he was prepared to go to any lengths to give his theory the best support that he could provide.
But there was more than this. That November he chose the kind of man he wanted to be—he chose to dedicate himself to his book, to placing his views as fully as he could before audiences that he as yet hardly envisaged, prepared to influence and urge to a degree that would become second nature to him, displaying a deepening of purpose and strength of character that he rarely acknowledged even in his most private correspondence and yet that marked the rest of his days. His active intervention in the post-publication process was hidden but intense. Paradoxically, the intimate process of writing personal letters, one individual speaking to another, became an integral part of his public voice, an activity that could be just as shrewd and tactical—even predatory—as any polemic dreamed up by Huxley.3 Without moving out of his home, Darwin came to dominate through letters. Promoting the finished book became the directing theme of the life to come as completely as his earlier years had been governed by constructing the theory.
He deliberately set about persuading people to consider his point of view. The reception of his book, as he understood it, would be a social process, depending at first on the force of his arguments and then progressively intertwining with the reactions and support of his friends, the networks of evaluation and accreditation pervading literary London, and his own influence on these. What he did not know then was the way in which it would move out from the elite audience he primarily intended to address at home and abroad to increasingly diverse sections of the reading public. His words would spread through journals, newspapers, public lectures, controversial tracts, and freethinking magazines at the same time as great cultural shifts became manifest—shifts in the status of science, in religious belief, in the impact of publishing, education, and social mobility. The story was not a straightforward triumphant advance, nor was it predic
table. Darwin could perhaps only dimly foresee that the rest of his life would be given to sustaining this one demanding publication.
Such circumstances would also change him from a quietly methodical naturalist, content to influence if possible only his own small circle, into a brilliant and subtle strategist. During the months following publication, he developed a style of personal presentation that materially advanced his cause. He showed himself constantly alive to the situations in which his readers and correspondents might find themselves, sensitive to embedded religious and cultural beliefs, quick to applaud any faltering steps in his direction, patient in explaining the same points over and over, resourceful and diplomatic, learning to use his words to further his aims, sometimes with craft and flattery, and often with genuine warmth. He realised that responses to his book would be affected by a whole range of factors and recognised that the dissemination and judgement of any new scientific argument relied in part on the ways in which particular groups of individuals organised the intellectual tasks on which they were engaged. So he refined his own techniques to pinpoint those who should be stirred into action, the most useful journals to approach, the best reviewers to court, the fiercest critics to disarm. He became skilled at marshalling his friends into an effective army. Much of this recruiting process was already familiar to him through his focus on collecting information by correspondence. Nevertheless his aims were different now, given fresh significance precisely because of the book’s importance to him. Overnight, Darwin’s focus shifted from private effort to public persuasion.
With the advance copy of the Origin of Species safely in his hands at Ilkley, he swung into the first of what would become many campaigns of action. He intended sending presentation copies to anyone who might be a significant help to him, and had already ordered eighty books from Murray beyond the twelve free copies due to him as author. He drew up a list of recipients and arranged that these volumes should be distributed direct from Murray’s office in London during the closing weeks of November 1859. The high cost of this scheme made him flinch a little. But publication was his symbolic point of no return. Each copy was inscribed by Murray’s clerk on the flyleaf “With the author’s compliments” or “From the author.” For this reason personally signed copies of first-day editions are never seen.4
Over the next two weeks, in between unpleasantly therapeutic cold baths, Darwin wrote letter after letter, each one delicately tailored to its recipient and aiming to defuse the worst of the anticipated criticisms. Few Victorian spa towns can have seen such a systematic publicity operation rolling out from its watery doors. Even his oldest friends were enticingly invited to agree with his proposals. “I shall be curious to hear what you think of it,” he told Fox, “but I am not so silly as to expect to convert you.” Suitably self-deprecating letters went to Wallace (“I hope there will be some little new to you, but I fear not much”), to Huxley (“I know there will be much in it which you will object to”), to Leonard Jenyns (“I know perfectly well that you will not at all agree with the lengths which I go”), to Thomas Eyton in Shropshire (“My book will horrify & disgust you”), to Bunbury (“If you are at all staggered I shall be quite interested”), to his old university teacher John Henslow (“I fear, however, that you will not approve of your pupil in this case”), to Adam Sedgwick (“You might think that I send my volume to you out of a spirit of bravado and with a want of respect, but I assure you that I am actuated by quite opposite feelings”), to Hugh Falconer (“Lord how savage you will be … how you will long to crucify me alive!”), and to young John Lubbock at High Elms (“I daresay when thunder and lightning were first found to be due to secondary causes, some regretted to give up the idea that each flash was caused by the direct hand of God”).
Tired, and no doubt disarmed by so much apology, he let his guard drop. He sent the most honest of all to Asa Gray.
Let me add I fully admit that there are very many difficulties not satisfactorily explained by my theory of descent with modification, but I cannot possibly believe that a false theory would explain so many classes of facts as I think it certainly does explain. On these grounds I drop my anchor, and believe that the difficulties will slowly disappear.5
Digging conscientiously around in his past for long-lost allies, he sent a copy to John Maurice Herbert, once a jaunty Cambridge University student and fellow member of the self-styled Glutton Club, now a senior judge on the county circuit. And of course there were copies for the family, Wedgwoods and Darwins alike; for friends and neighbours in Downe village like John Brodie Innes and George Norman; for his old Beagle captain Robert FitzRoy, moored to a desk in Whitehall; and for the two medical men closest to him, Edward Lane and Sir Henry Holland. Darwin looked forward to hearing what Holland thought. He was a clever man, much respected in the family circle, and widely influential elsewhere. It would be unforgivable if Darwin failed to send him a copy. Pleasant memories demanded the same for Edward Lane. It appears that he also showed his advance copy to Mary Butler while they were both taking the waters.
As for the rest, this was his chance to write directly to the men who would shortly be judging the Origin of Species in reviews and articles, the men of the day who would discuss his ideas in London clubs and at dinner parties. He knew that any serious contribution to intellectual thought largely depended on this form of elite, verbal assessment. Indeed, he saw it was a key feature of the Victorian publishing process. For many years now Darwin had participated in exactly the same buzz of knowledgeable chat and correspondence. Through a well-established cycle of discussion and authentication, concentric networks of specialists usually talked things over and came to a verdict.6 The same members of the intelligentsia that had previously engaged with Vestiges and with Buckle’s and Spencer’s developmental laws would at least consider Darwin’s views thoughtfully, although they might not agree with them. He planned to activate “every scrap of influence” he had gathered over the years.
He therefore sent presentation copies to many of the most interesting, modern-minded men in Britain, some of whom he scarcely knew, such as Charles Kingsley and Herbert Spencer, while also judiciously covering the handful of celebrities with whom he was acquainted, such as Sir John Herschel and Lord Stanhope, the historian. To these he added distinguished foreign naturalists and as many leading biologists as he could identify, each of whom he hoped would see his work as a real contribution to the intellectual problems they faced in natural science. Were there “any good & speculative foreigners to whom it would be worth while to send copies?” he inquired of Huxley. “If you write to Von Baer,” he continued, “for heaven’s sake tell him that we should think one nod of approbation on our side, of the greatest value; and if he does write anything, beg him to send us a copy, for I would try and get it translated and published in the Athenaeum and in ‘Silliman’ [Benjamin Silliman, editor of American Journal of Science and Arts] to touch up Agassiz.”7 In the end, his list of eighty or so names embraced most of the major geologists, naturalists, and biologists in the world, as well as individuals based in all the main natural history institutions in Europe, North America, and across the British empire, reflecting a high geographical and international spread, including Henri Milne-Edwards, Louis Agassiz, James Dwight Dana, Joachim Barrande, Johannes Steenstrup, François Pictet, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, James Dwight Dana, Julius Carus, Richard Owen, John Phillips, Carl von Siebold, Jean Louis Quatrefages de Breau, and elderly Heinrich Bronn.8 Even though these naturalists were unlikely to accept Darwin’s proposals, they would be drawn into the resulting debate. A man who is given a copy of a book by its author, accompanied by a charming letter, finds it that much harder to attack or denigrate.
In passing, Darwin’s list of names reflected other social factors. Hardly any unknown people were listed to receive presentation copies. Apart from sending the Origin of Species to William Tegetmeier, his trusted pigeon friend, and to one or two noted breeders and practical men who had helped him, Darwin signally failed to
distribute copies to any of the scores of people drawn from the vigorous subcultures of natural history, horticulture, and agriculture in Britain, and elsewhere, who had supplied relevant information. Everyone who received the book as a gift was someone of influence or a close personal friend. In this, Darwin’s immediate concern was to place his views in front of those judges who mattered most. Still, the omission made his ulterior purpose manifest: he did not bother with people who could not make a difference. Tellingly, Darwin did not send a copy to Robert Grant, the man who first introduced him to the idea of evolution in Edinburgh. He did not send one to Harriet Martineau, the committed Malthusian author and intimate friend of his brother’s. Darwin evidently weighed each recipient’s influence in the balance and discarded those he considered least important to his cause. Several of these omissions were rectified when the second edition came out.
At Murray’s end, business steamed ahead. The publisher sent nearly forty copies out to review journals. He further gave a few copies of his own to friends such as Elwin, of the Quarterly Review, and perhaps Michael Faraday.9 Here and there, other pre-publication copies slipped beyond Darwin’s control. Erasmus Darwin sent one to Harriet Martineau, who now lived as a reclusive invalid in Ambleside in the Lake District. He may have known that Martineau was not on Darwin’s list at Murray’s.
Before publication, Darwin was broadly able to shape the initial distribution of his work, and, as he hoped, at least something of the initial response. All this changed as publication day loomed. With four days to go, an adverse blast in the Athenaeum rocked his composure. The anonymous reviewer (John Leifchild) scorched through his advance copy, highlighting its dreadful implications: “If a monkey has become a man—what may not a man become?” The reviewer declared that Darwin’s book was almost too dangerous to read. It should be put in the safe hands of theologians and left “to the mercies of the Divinity Hall, the College, the Lecture Room and the Museum.”10