by Janet Browne
Thoroughly taken aback, Darwin showed the letter to Emma. Stoically, she supported her husband. But she in turn refused to show it to Henrietta Darwin, probably thinking she was not old enough to know the full extent of her father’s heresy.31 Hellfire was a chastening thought for Victorians.32 Sedgwick’s affable comment at the end about being a “son of a monkey” only made the laceration worse.
Darwin’s mettle was up. Even an old friend and teacher like Sedgwick could be swept aside if necessary. “I never could believe that an inquisitor could be a good man,” he told Lyell, “but now I know that a man may roast another and yet have as kind & noble a heart as Sedgwick’s.”33
Close behind was Robert FitzRoy with an equally emotional postal onslaught. “My dear old friend,” the captain wrote tempestuously, “I, at least, cannot find anything ‘ennobling’ in the thought of being a descendent of even the most ancient Ape.”34 Another letter from FitzRoy appeared in the correspondence columns of the Times a few days later, signed with the pseudonym Senex.35 Darwin’s heart sank. He knew it was from FitzRoy because of the repetition of the argument about primitive mankind. “It is a pity he did not add his theory of the extinction of Mastodon &c from the door of the Ark being made too small,” he grumbled to Lyell. “What a mixture of conceit & folly, & the greatest newspaper in the world inserts it!”36
All this was no more than he anticipated. There were several conservatives among his friends who were bound to hate the book. But the Victorian establishment was full of exceptions. A kindly letter arrived from Rev. Charles Kingsley, who wrote from his country parsonage to acknowledge his presentation copy of the Origin of Species. “All that I have seen of it awes me,” Kingsley said. “Both with the heap of facts, & the prestige of your name, & also with the clear intuition, that if you be right, I must give up much that I have believed & written.”
Kingsley was a good naturalist, well versed in geology and zoology, the author of a respected seaside book as well as renowned for his reformist theological tracts and state-of-the-nation novels. Huxley greatly admired his intellect, saying that Kingsley’s inquiring mind was attractively open to new ideas, quite the opposite to men of Bishop Wilberforce’s ilk. Kingsley also knew Darwin’s brother Erasmus slightly, and Fanny and Hensleigh Wedgwood through the Christian Socialist movement. He appeared sincerely interested in Darwin’s arguments, telling Darwin he could imagine an all-wise, all-powerful deity making organisms that make themselves. Indeed, he was the first clergyman to see in Darwin’s schemes an internal beauty that could be shared by science and spiritual revelation alike. To Kingsley, scientists who tried to explain away the existence of the spirit would be as intellectually stunted as clerics who attempted to dismiss the truths of science. “I have gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of deity to believe that he created primal forms capable of self development … as to believe that he required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas which He himself had made.”37
As it happened, nothing could have been further from Darwin’s intention. Natural selection was a phenomenon that could never be governed, or set into motion, by a Creator. Kingsley had misunderstood that the main point of Darwin’s book was to remove the Creator from nature.
Nevertheless, Darwin snatched eagerly at these proffered plaudits. Urgently, he asked if he could quote Kingsley’s letter in the forthcoming reprint of the Origin of Species. He hoped to show that hysterical shrieks from the Athenaeum or from FitzRoy and Sedgwick were utterly unjustified—that at least one prominent (if rebellious) Church of England parson did not condemn him outright.
Genially, Kingsley agreed, soon appearing in print as an unnamed “celebrated cleric” in the new edition of the Origin of Species (published 7 January 1860), and in all editions thereafter.38 It was Kingsley who provided the few consolatory words of devotion in Darwin’s book in which it was suggested that it was possible to believe in God as the ultimate author of evolution, conciliatory words that Darwin would otherwise never have allowed and certainly did not deliver in his own voice. And it was Kingsley who became the first theologian publicly to endorse evolution in the closing pages of the Origin of Species itself, an early indication of the remarkable flexibility of the Anglican Church when faced with evolutionary issues.
Darwin went on to match Kingsley’s pious phrases with two adjustments of his own. Where, in the final lines of the first edition of the Origin of Species, he had written of life being breathed into a few primordial forms, he now altered it to read “the breath of the Creator,” a concession that he later regretted. He also added an extra epigraph to the two already in the front of the volume, extracting a passage from Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Revealed Religion in which Butler stated that the word “natural” indicated the existence of an intelligent agent just as much as the words “supernatural” or “miraculous”; in other words, God could work through scientific laws as effectively as through divine omnipotence.39 Unaccountably stung by the Athenaeum review, and annoyed by what he regarded as the religious prejudices of at least two of his oldest acquaintances, Darwin here defiantly stepped out on the long journey of compromise that would in the future come to plague him.
But he could hardly have arranged it better if he had tried. Even before the reviews began, he had his shotguns loaded.
III
He brought the Ilkley trip to a close on 7 December 1859 and travelled down to London for a day or two at Erasmus’s house to make calls on friends and relations. The eczema and stomach troubles had gone. He felt much better now the book was out. In between half hours with Lyell (“a complete convert”), Carpenter (“he reviews me in the National … but the last mouthful chokes him”), Huxley (“It will be God’s blessing if I do not become the most conceited man in all England”), Dr. Holland (“going an immense way”), and John Edward Gray of the British Museum (“attacked me in fine style”), he visited Murray in the famous drawing room at Albermarle Street, the first time author and publisher had met face to face for a decade. It was a satisfying occasion, the one gratified by the sales record, the other relieved to have vindicated the decision to go forward and publish. They discussed Darwin’s corrections for the impending edition. Many of these were handed over there and then. A print run of three thousand copies did not seem nearly so outlandish a proposition as before. Together they laid plans for the future: translations and overseas editions if possible, and another printing of the Journal of Researches (in a green binding to match the Origin) to capitalise on public interest.
On this visit Darwin negotiated the terms on which he would ever afterwards continue with Murray. Warily, he cut off any opportunity for the publisher to make unfair profit out of his hard work. He remembered how Henry Colburn had fleeced him over the first printing of Journal of a Naturalist. If there was to be either profit or risk, he wanted it shared equally. In fact, he was among the first Victorian authors to negotiate what is now known as an advance against royalties. Forty years later, Murray looked back on his arrangements. “The system on which Mr. Darwin preferred to be remunerated for his books, was to have an estimate made of each edition as it was printed, and to have his share of the prospective profits paid him in anticipation.”
This is an unusual method of payment, if for no other reason because no one can tell exactly beforehand what an edition will produce, as there are several unknown factors in the calculation.… Mr. Darwin constantly inquired into details—no angry or irritable word ever seems to have passed between him and his publisher. He did not blindly accept facts and figures which came before him; he investigated them all, and questioned when he was in doubt; but his questioning was always that of frankness and courtesy.40
He also received some good advice. Murray felt that the large book on natural selection lurking in the back of Darwin’s mind was not much of a publishing proposition. It would run to three volumes, Murray protested; it was relentlessly over-detailed. Why destroy future sales of the Origin of Species with the dea
d weight of a fully academic treatise? Murray’s sound head for business told him that Darwin ought to stick with his Origin in the same way that Lyell had stuck to the Principles of Geology. Gamely, he suggested that Darwin think of a series of smaller books based on his accumulated materials. As a result, Darwin agreed to split up his work in the manner Murray recommended, seemingly envisaging something like his earlier trio of books on the Geology of South America and forgetting how that particular geological set had quickly become a hated trial to him. But he would not have contemplated abandoning his big book on species any other way. The material must come out in some form or another, he thought. The detailed evidence on which his argument was based must be laid before an audience. He had promised this in the introduction to the Origin of Species. With the plan settled, he returned to Downe more content with life than he had felt for a long time.
Only Richard Owen made him uneasy. Darwin could not gauge what Owen’s judgement was at all when he paid a social call during his London stay. Up until then the great naturalist had occasionally remarked that he looked favourably on “continuously operative creating forces.” These remarks were more or less consistent with the views he half-expressed about Darwin’s and Wallace’s Linnean Society papers; and Darwin had never yet believed Huxley’s bloodcurdling stories about the black deeds Owen got up to behind other people’s backs. Owen wrote to Darwin in a pleasant fashion after receiving his copy of the Origin of Species, and Darwin genuinely wanted to know what he thought. Owen, more than anyone, could influence the direction in which the diverse body of European naturalists might swing.
This visit did not augur well. On the surface, everything seemed as usual. Yet Darwin sensed rocks close to shore. First, Owen informed him that he thought natural selection was completely wrong on biological grounds. He believed that organisms revealed in their anatomy a plan, and that a purely mechanical force like natural selection was hopelessly inadequate to explain it. This was not just prejudice. Owen brought a fine knowledge of comparative anatomy to bear on Darwin’s theory and found it wanting.
The book also hit Owen at a particularly tense time. All his hopes for the future were currently in doubt, especially his longstanding dream of a splendid new natural history museum built to his own design.41 This plan was thwarted at every step by Huxley and Hooker, who both strongly objected to institutional centralisation, not least the ill-effects of putting power over all the natural history sciences into one man’s hands—especially if they were Owen’s. Huxley had already protested to Parliament several times about Owen’s proposed natural history museum, sending in petitions signed by Darwin and other naturalists. These petitions delayed the new museum until the 1880s.
That was not all. Huxley hotly criticised Owen’s classification scheme for mammals—a scheme based on the comparative anatomy of the brain. From Owen’s perspective, it looked as if Huxley and his cronies went out of their way to block his path.42 Nor did Owen welcome the emergence of Darwin as a major intellectual rival in Britain. While he could praise the philosophical syntheses of Louis Agassiz in America, Lorenz Oken in Germany, and Georges Cuvier in France, these were scholars who dominated or had dominated other national arenas. Owen considered himself the leading figure in British natural history. Taking these factors together, his response to Darwin’s Origin was bound to be jaundiced.
Most of all, however, Owen’s pride was injured. There, in the black-and-white print of the Origin of Species, were cruel words labelling him as an old-fashioned creationist. “All the most eminent palaeontologists, namely Cuvier, Owen, Agassiz, Barrande, Falconer, E. Forbes, &c.,” said Darwin, “have unanimously, often vehemently, maintained the immutability of species.”43 Owen was annoyed beyond measure; offended.
And so, as Darwin told Lyell afterwards, the atmosphere was cool when he went to call.44 Smoothly disagreeable, Owen sprinkled doubt on the accuracy of Darwin’s facts and cast a patronising eye over his style of reasoning. “If I must criticise, I shd. say, we do not want to know what Darwin believes & is convinced of, but what he can prove.” Miserably, Darwin agreed. He would try to reduce the quantity of “believes” and “convinceds” next time around. “You will then spoil your book,” cooed Owen. The charm of the writing, he said perversely, was that it was the “voice of Darwin himself.” To cap it all, just before they parted, he said he wanted to mention the Origin of Species in some essays he was editing for publication. Owen intended saying that “the best attempt to answer this supreme question in zoology has been made by Charles Darwin.”
The man was exasperating; and Darwin afterwards wished he had said what was in his mind instead of shaking hands and leaving on cordial terms. A short discussion about bears and whales particularly irritated him. Taking his information from Samuel Hearne, an old-time Canadian trapper, Darwin stated in the Origin of Species that black bears often swim for hours with their mouths open catching insects. Though he rarely hazarded a guess about the actual course of evolution, he risked it with this graphic example. “I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.”45 Just before their meeting, Owen sent word (via Lyell) that Hearne’s story was incorrect, and Darwin deleted the offending sentence from the new edition. During the visit to London, the facts were again adjusted. This time, according to Owen, Hearne was correct. “I am to send him the reference, & by Jove I believe he thinks a sort of Bear was the grandpapa of Whales!”
Polite as this meeting was, it signalled the beginning of the end for the two naturalists, not only in private terms but also in regard to larger movements already under way. The Origin of Species—and all that it represented—pushed itself forcefully between them. Owen and Darwin were soon engaged in a quarrel that drew in other men and other issues and became integral to the polarisation of debate about evolution. It seems that Darwin’s book was already requiring the people closest to him to take sides, to align themselves with like-minded friends or to drop longstanding acquaintances. This was the last time Darwin and Owen ever spoke.
The year ended with an important coup. On 26 December 1859, the Times ran a favourable review, ridiculously favourable for such a conventional paper. Darwin was sure the article must be by Huxley, but was equally sure that Huxley had never before been asked to write for this closely guarded mouthpiece of the British establishment. The Times was tradition itself, regularly satirised by Trollope as “Jupiter Olympus”—the very voice of the gods. The paper ran book reviews only once or twice a month. Darwin had never contemplated the possibility that a good review would land on the breakfast tables of the ruling classes on the day after Christmas.
“Who can the author be?” he innocently inquired of Huxley.
The author is a literary man & German scholar.—He has read my book attentively; but what is very remarkable, it seems that he is a profound naturalist. He knows my Barnacle book, & appreciates it too highly.—Lastly he writes & thinks with uncommon force & clearness; & what is even still rarer his writing is seasoned with most pleasant wit.… Who can it be? Certainly I should have said that there was only one man in England who could have written this essay & that you were the man. But I suppose I am wrong, & that there is some hidden genius of great calibre. For how could you influence Jupiter Olympus & make him give 3½ columns to pure science. The old Fogies will think the world will come to an end. Well whoever the man is, he has done great service to the cause, far more than by a dozen reviews in common periodicals.… If you should happen to be acquainted with the author for Heaven-sake tell me who he is.46
Hooker broke the secret a few days later. Huxley had been to a jolly Christmas party where Samuel Lucas, the normal Times reviewer, admitted he had no idea what to say. The two men struck a bargain over their glasses of hock and agreed that Huxley should write the review. It would be submitted as if it were by Lucas while Huxley pocketed the fee, just the
kind of cloak-and-dagger intrigue that Huxley relished.
The joke was even better when Mrs. Hooker declared she recognised Huxley’s work from “the very first sentence.” Darwin and Emma laughed conspiratorily, for Huxley told them that the opening paragraph was actually written by Lucas in order to keep up appearances. They could not bring themselves to confess to Frances Hooker. Huxley was such a rogue, said Darwin: such a “good & admirable agent for the promulgation of damnable heresies.”
His circle of intimate friends was emerging as an exceptionally gifted and powerful team. Somehow he had produced a theory that inspired passions and commitments these men were prepared to defend to the hilt.
IV
As the new year took hold Darwin watched his book become a minor sensation. There were plenty of notices in the newspapers. The Press (10 December 1859), John Bull (24 December 1859), the Daily News (26 December 1859), the News of the World (8 January 1860), the Morning Post (10 January 1860), the St. James’ Chronicle (10 January 1860), the Patriot (19 January 1860), and the Guardian (8 February 1860) all carried brief accounts, only one of which (the Daily News) was completely hostile. The Critic was as critical as its name suggested; the English Churchman surprisingly less so. The Spectator was restrained, disclaiming any “judicial pretensions” and making a clear distinction between Darwin’s scholarly approach and the writings of Lamarck and Vestiges. Although the Saturday Review, fondly known to Victorians as the “Saturday Slasher,” slashed away, Darwin felt that the anonymous reviewer was issuing “some good & well deserved raps” on one or two geological points. There was not much to send him rushing for shelter.