Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  Immobilised in wet sheets at Ilkley, his face covered with eczema, Darwin was furious. He saw that all his cautious circumlocutions were blatantly ignored by the Athenaeum’s reviewer. “The manner in which he drags in immortality, & sets the Priests at me & leaves me to their mercies, is base,” he raged. “He would on no account burn me; but he will get the wood ready & tell the black beasts how to catch me.”11 It seemed to him that the Athenaeum was hell-bent on sensationalising the topic even before other people could read the text. Caught by surprise by the violence of the review, and by the strength of his own reaction, Darwin fired off bitter complaints by letter to his most sympathetic anti-clerical friends. All of a sudden, he hated being at Ilkley. His health worsened, he sprained an ankle, his face was as bad as he ever remembered, and his temper short. It was “odious,” he moaned.

  That first review rankled and rankled. For years he carried a grudge against the anonymous reviewer, whom he wrongly identified as Samuel Woodward on the basis of something that Hooker let slip. For years, too, the unfortunate Woodward did not understand why Darwin had suddenly turned so frosty. Long afterwards, Darwin still felt raw, and he never could bring himself to acknowledge that perhaps he was over-reacting and that the first unfriendly review invariably hurts the most. From then on, he regarded the Athenaeum with suspicion.

  Yet as Murray predicted, it made no difference in the end. While Darwin wrote his letters and grumbled about the Yorkshire rain, Murray organised the customary “sale dinner,” one of the signposts of the publishing year when agents and bookshops placed bulk orders for items on his forthcoming list. “All the principal booksellers were invited. The new books of the season were introduced to them and offered on specially favourable terms.”12 Murray’s ledgers show that he took orders for the Origin of Species at this sale, held on 22 November 1859 at the Albion Hotel in central London. Of the thirty books about to come out under Murray’s imprint, Darwin’s vied for top billing with two other future classics of the era, Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, the homely bible for social betterment, and Leopold McClintock’s Narrative of the Discovery of the Fate of Sir John Franklin, the final denouement in the tragic saga of Franklin’s quest for a northwest passage. McClintock’s heroic tale promised to be the story of the season: Murray hoped for orders for more than seven thousand copies. Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help was likely to be equally successful in matching the pulse of the nation. No other nineteenth-century publishing firm ever issued three such books on the same day—Darwin, McClintock, and Smiles—books that so accurately represented the Victorian frame of mind.

  The only serious competition that Murray forecast was Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, a surefire hit from Chapman & Hall. Other notable books already in print from rival firms were John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, issued earlier in 1859; Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, clearly a market leader; George Eliot’s Adam Bede; and The Virginians by Thackeray. Confident in his author’s selling power, Murray increased the print run of the Origin of Species to 1,250.13

  At the trade sale Murray took orders for 1,500 copies, some 250 more than the actual number printed. This satisfying statistic gave rise to his remark that the book “sold out” on the day of publication although the overall number scarcely matched the many thousands of copies of novels sold by Chapman & Hall or Richard Bentley in a single year, or the 60,000 copies of the solidly religious Bridgewater Treatises that had accumulated on the nation’s shelves by 1860.14

  The most striking thing about Murray’s sale was not so much that Darwin sold out—common enough if the market was judged correctly—but that five hundred went to Mudie’s Circulating Library. Such a high figure was gratifying for Murray, although also modest enough when compared with Mudie’s purchase of 3,520 copies of David Livingstone’s Travels in 1857 or his order for 3,000 copies of McClintock’s Narrative on the same day as Darwin was up for bids. Publishers, authors, and readers all recognised the might of the subscription libraries.

  Of these Mudie’s was the mightiest.15 His purchase guaranteed Darwin a broad audience, an audience moreover that would repeat and repeat while each copy of the book was lent to a number of subscribers in turn. Although Mudie undoubtedly banked on Darwin’s previous attractions as a natural history writer rather than wanting to thrust a subversive tract into God-fearing homes across the country, no one needed a soothsayer to explain that the lending library would propel the Origin of Species into a much more popular general category than its subject matter initially suggested. Five hundred copies of the Origin of Species might well be read by some two thousand subscribers. Unfortunately the actual circulation figures are unknown for all Mudie’s volumes.

  Somewhat unexpectedly, too, given the prudish reputation that surrounded Mudie’s fiction list, adding the Origin of Species to the Oxford Street depot was not too much of a gamble. As a reader himself, Mudie was greatly interested in contemporary American transcendental philosophy and in the nature of the human mind, a private passion reflected in the content of his nonfiction catalogues, which usually offered a selection of evolutionary and early psychological texts.16 Like Murray, he moreover appreciated the commercial benefits of controversy. Mudie’s Library, hitherto much underestimated in the popularisation of science in general, was to become an important force in the dissemination of evolutionary views for the next twenty or thirty years.17 The firm’s quarterly catalogues of books from 1865 or so were to offer most of the more well-known post-Darwinian titles, including all the new editions of the Origin of Species and Vestiges, and books by Huxley, Lubbock, Tylor, and Lyell, as well as an extensive range of criticism and alternatives. Mudie’s admiration for Darwin as the centrepiece of a publishing phenomenon ran sufficiently high for him at a later date to invite the naturalist to dine (Darwin declined).18 From the start, however, Darwin acknowledged the effect that Mudie had on enlarging his readership. With this purchase, Mudie made it possible for Darwin’s book to reach a far wider public than either author or publisher had contemplated.

  On the day after the sale, Murray relayed the good news to Ilkley that the print run was exhausted.19 Another surprise followed. Instead of merely reprinting from the set-up type, Murray said he could admit a few corrections if Darwin wished to send them, and could therefore issue the book as a second edition (technically, it ought to have been called a corrected reprint). Murray wanted to fulfil the orders as soon as possible and asked Darwin to send him any changes immediately

  Darwin was deeply pleased. So was Emma, the patient ghost behind his never-ending struggle for perfection. “It is a wonderful thing the whole edition selling off at once & Mudie taking 500 copies,” she remarked to William with understandable satisfaction. “Your father says he shall never think small beer of himself again & that candidly he does think it very well written.”

  On 1 December 1859, Murray started setting up the slips for the new edition. On 3 December, Mudie’s Select Library advertised that the Origin of Species was available to be borrowed.

  II

  Nearly two hundred letters and a torrent of reviews passed through the author’s hands during the next six months. These months were among the most demanding he had ever experienced.

  The expected storm of controversy did not crack open immediately. On the contrary, the first effects were unexpectedly personal, for publication brought with it a spontaneous alteration in the way his closest friends regarded him. Darwin’s colleagues wrote to him straight away, full of a new kind of admiration. For a fraction of a second there was just the slightest hint of incredulity—incredulity that the “dear old Darwin” of their correspondence possessed such hidden powers of genius. Even though each of them already understood the bare bones of Darwin’s theory—several had read parts of the volume before publication, and two of them were actively involved in putting the theory before the public at the Linnean Society—it seems that none quite anticipated the final majesty of his vision. One by one, they expressed their delighted surprise at the perspectives
he revealed. One by one, they offered intellectual respect and started to align themselves behind him.

  Lyell fairly bristled with affectionate pride. Whatever misgivings he may have continued to feel in private, he believed that Darwin’s ideas were too important to remain secret. He was truly pleased to see the book published. “Right glad I am that I did my best with Hooker to persuade you to publish it without waiting for a time which probably could never have arrived tho’ you lived till the age of 100,” he gloated. It was a grand work, he said. “A splendid case of close reasoning & long sustained argument throughout so many pages.”20

  Lyell was much inclined to dissect the finer points of detail, and these conversations were vital in helping Darwin clarify the text of the forthcoming reprint and the many subsequent editions. Kindly and proprietorial, Lyell looked through all the reviews and correspondence, making notes in his scientific journal about the problems that bothered him most and talking them over with Darwin and other colleagues.21 Darwin’s book in fact marked a real turning point in Lyell’s mental existence. For so long Lyell had been shackled to revising edition after edition of his geological textbooks, and he badly needed something different to fire his interest. The Origin of Species raised his temperature again. Suddenly he found his mind racing with inquiries and tricky problems to resolve. He bombarded Darwin with letters, earnestly seeking answers to a whole range of difficult questions.

  Symbolically, too, the occasion was charged with meaning. Like many notable couples in science, like Freud and Jung, or Manson and Ross, master and disciple silently began changing places. Where Lyell’s Principles of Geology had presented the young Darwin with the gift of scientific insight and showed him how to think about the natural world, Darwin’s Origin of Species now offered Lyell fresh intellectual purpose. In a way, these books embodied the creative stimulus that each man exerted on the other. Nearly three decades after Lyell first shaped Darwin’s intellectual horizons, the Origin of Species in turn opened up for Lyell the most stimulating areas of thought that he encountered in his later years. As such, their relative positions shifted. The torch was passed from one to the other, and accepted, a heartfelt act of homage between them. Sensitively—almost tenderly—they recognised each other’s central place in their intellectual lives.

  Daringly, Lyell decided to rewrite his Manual of Geology to accommodate the new evolutionary view and joked about his and Darwin’s mutual descent from tadpoles. Dean Milman, Lyell reported cheerily in the first few weeks after publication, said that the writing of the Origin of Species was in itself enough to refute the possibility of such a froggy ancestry.22 In the event, Lyell’s proposed pages on natural selection never made it into the Manual, although it turned up in different form in his subsequent book on the antiquity of mankind. Darwin’s gratitude was rapid and real. “I fully believe that I owe the comfort of the next few years of my life to your generous support & that of a very few others: I do not think I am brave enough to have stood being odious without support. Now I feel as bold as a Lion.”23

  Other friends saw the great originality and power in Darwin’s scheme without necessarily conceding the point. The palaeontologist Hugh Falconer read his presentation copy as eagerly as the rest, yet was implacably opposed to its overall argument: “I have been dying like all the world besides to see your book upon species … the wicked book which you have been so long a-hatching,” he wrote to Darwin. Falconer never accepted evolution. But he never considered giving up his friendship with Darwin either; and he vigorously defended Darwin’s right to be heard. He was no more shocked by the Origin of Species than Hooker, who labelled it “glorious.” Falconer ended up regarding natural selection with genial amusement. When he subsequently offered Darwin a living specimen of an unusual lizard, he could not resist the opportunity to tease. “In your hands it will thrive—and have a fair chance of being developed without delay into some kind of the Columbidae, say a Pouter or a Tumbler.”24

  Hooker willingly accepted the new view of nature. He had lived with it in letters for so long that he was not likely to turn his back on Darwin now. “What a mass of close reasoning on curious facts and fresh phenomena.… I see I shall have much to talk over with you,” he said. “I expect to think I would rather be author of your book than of any other on natural history science.”25

  “I really think it is the most interesting book I ever read,” wrote Erasmus, echoing the chorus of friendly approval. Harriet Martineau was ecstatic. “One might say ‘thank you’ all one’s life without giving any idea of one’s sense of obligation.… we must all be glad that he has set the world on this great new track,” she wrote to Fanny Wedgwood.26 And shortly afterwards, Darwin heard from Huxley, a wonderful whoop of praise and pleasure. It was a noble book, Huxley cried; no book had made such an impression on him since he had read Karl von Baer’s embryology nine years before, a high compliment from the man who translated von Baer into English and whose embryological understanding was firmly based on the German’s doctrines. As Huxley remembered it, the beauty of Darwin’s theory flashed on him like lightning showing the way home in a storm. “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!”27 He was struck by the theory’s elegance and economy.

  Huxley’s praise was evidently sincere. For more than a decade he had longed to find order in nature where apparent chaos reigned. Darwin’s naturalistic proposals provided just the kind of intellectual synthesis and challenge he most enjoyed, and his friend’s approach and aims chimed impressively with his own. Like Lyell’s, his viewpoint materially changed. “I am prepared to go the stake if requisite in support of Chap. IX,” he declared, referring to the chapter where Darwin wrote of the imperfection of the fossil record: “Depend upon it you have earned the lasting gratitude of all thoughtful men.” Yet he was not prepared to accept all of the book uncritically. There were points on which he disagreed or reserved his judgement. He did not like Darwin’s insistence on infinitesimal, gradual change, feeling that Darwin gave himself an unnecessary burden by not allowing even the smallest jump in the fossil record, and promoted the point endlessly in future correspondence. He was not sure what to make of the three central chapters on variation, instinct, and hybridism, either, issues that emerged again and again in talks with Darwin and others. He never accepted Darwin’s proposals about the way sterility between previously fertile individuals might emerge in order to make a self-contained breeding population. In these hesitations, Huxley revealed the roots of important criticisms he was to develop much more strongly over the next few years. Even during his first headlong lunge, he emerged as a disciple who did not fully accept the doctrine in all its parts. It was a double-edged sword that he handled with flamboyant panache. He referred to the theory as a “working hypothesis,” a phrase that satisfied him rather more than it did Darwin.

  He was certain of one thing. Darwin would encounter “considerable abuse & misrepresentation.” Some of Darwin’s friends, he laughed, possessed just the right amount of combativeness to go to war on his behalf: “I am sharpening up my claws & beak in readiness.”28

  Darwin sighed with relief. He had worried about losing Huxley’s approval—or worse, turning him into an enemy.

  Like a good Catholic who has received extreme unction, I can now sing “Nunc dimittis” [Lord, now lettest thy servant depart in peace].… Exactly fifteen months ago, when I put pen to paper for this volume, I had awful misgivings, & thought perhaps I had deluded myself like so many have done; & I then fixed in my mind three judges, on whose decision I determined mentally to abide. The judges were Lyell, Hooker & yourself. It was this which made me so excessively anxious for your verdict. I am now contented, & can sing my nunc dimittis. What a joke it will be if I pat you on the back when you attack some immoveable creationist!29

  Attacks were not long in coming, either. These too were at first shockingly personal. The full blast of “odium theologicum” arrived in a letter from Adam Sedgwick, Darwin’s old teacher and professor of geology. Aged se
venty-four, still lecturing to undergraduates at Cambridge, Sedgwick was never likely to agree with the Origin of Species despite all his avuncular kindnesses to Darwin in the past. His theologically attuned understanding of nature had strengthened with the passage of years; and his dislike of Lamarck, Vestiges, and any other transmutationary doctrine was expressed in regular, increasingly irritated supplements to his Discourse on the Studies of Cambridge. He opened his most powerful fire in a monster preface attached to the 1850 edition. For Sedgwick, evolution spelled theological mayhem. The purpose of science, he had declared for forty years or more, was to keep mankind faithful to the path of God.

  Even so, Darwin was unprepared for the closely written assault which appeared on the table in Yorkshire. “I have read your book with more pain than pleasure,” Sedgwick wrote.

  Parts of it I admired greatly; parts I laughed until my sides were sore; other parts I read with absolute sorrow; because I think them utterly false & grievously mischievous—You have deserted—after a start in that tram-road of all solid physical truth—the true method of induction—& started up a machinery as wild, I think, as Bishop Wilkin’s locomotive that was to sail us to the moon.30

  The professor then launched into a stern Sunday sermon, reminding Darwin there was a moral part to nature as well as a physical: “a man who denies this is deep in the mire of folly.” To accept Darwin’s argument would “sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history.” Moreover he thought Darwin indulged in a tone of triumphant confidence, “a tone I condemned in the author of the Vestiges.” Sedgwick advised Darwin to accept God’s revelation. If he did, the two naturalists might eventually meet in heaven. The agitated old cleric felt no need to spell out the alternative.