by Janet Browne
The monthly, quarterly, and fortnightly journals gathered pace soon after. A significant number of these longer reviews were by his friends: Huxley contributed a review to an early number of Macmillan’s Magazine; Robert Chambers appeared in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal; Hooker in the Gardeners’ Chronicle; and Carpenter in the National Review. They all recommended the Origin of Species for careful consideration and noted the author’s respectability and status as a naturalist. For the most part, however, these initial assessments were muted, a sure reflection of Darwin’s high reputation and perhaps also of the physical substance of the book. Nearly all these early reviewers found the going tough. The abstruse nature of the Origin of Species was a central feature in the first written accounts of its power and authority. Even the bad reviews were subdued.
Darwin naturally read these notices with great curiosity. Since he mostly knew the identity of the anonymous authors, he was eager to see what they were willing to say in print. One or two amusingly convoluted letters arrived in the post at Down House around now as people who knew him socially tried to smooth over the possible result of their public utterances. John Crawfurd, who delivered an unfavourable judgement in the Examiner for December 1859, wrote to Darwin apologetically to explain why he could not make any approving remarks.
It was obvious, however, that the book was shaping up to become a publishing phenomenon. This aspect of Darwin’s public trajectory has often been underestimated. Indeed, what has retrospectively come to be known as the Darwinian revolution was, in reality, as much about the transmission of texts across the world and throughout society as it was about science’s ultimate agreement about the validity of natural selection. Darwin and his theories—and then the Darwinian movement as a whole—benefitted enormously from the unprecedented surge in publishing activity in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Over and above the new ideas that the Origin of Species presented, Darwin’s volume took its place in a far broader cultural movement that heralded the age of mass media and growing audiences for print materials.
Darwin, and Darwin’s friends, were quick to recognise the power of the press. That sector of society which read and reviewed books was more influential than ever before. And the advent of relatively inexpensive printing and the spread of literacy in the nineteenth century, in both Europe and America, were giving several previously mute parts of the social body a voice and an arena in which they could be heard.47 As their band-wagon started moving, evolutionists swiftly commandeered a slice of the Victorian publishing world, ensuring that the Origin of Species, as well as the bundle of reformist ideas with which it would come to be associated, took a substantial place in the spectrum of printed materials characterising the period. While Darwin’s words carried an undeniable impact in themselves, he and his friends willingly participated in the revolution in communications that would encourage the circulation of scientific ideas through the common intellectual context and across national and social boundaries.
At that time, review journals were the primary medium for a British author seeking approval. In 1859 and 1860 such journals were proliferating like flies, some hoping to rival the comprehensive coverage of the Athenaeum or the Literary Gazette, others competing with establishment monoliths like the Quarterly, the Edinburgh, and the Westminster, each of which maintained huge readerships and well-defined political allegiances. Along with the review journals came new magazines catering to the burgeoning middle classes that were stimulated by cheaper and more efficient printing machinery, better distribution systems, and ever-widening constituencies as public education roared onwards and polite society discovered it had time on its hands. Some directed attention to useful activity. Many purveyed fiction and poetry. One by one they opened up different parts of the market by undercutting cover prices and providing a much more varied choice of approaches and contents than the older literary reviews. New subjects ranged from high-society gossip and fashion to money-spinning innovations like illustrations and serialised novels. Many publications were small, independently owned concerns like Dickens’s Household Words and All the Year Round, or Thackeray’s Cornhill Magazine, which was founded in January 1860. Still others were the in-house products of forward-looking publishing firms hoping to capitalise on market trends, like Macmillan’s Magazine, first published by Alexander Macmillan in November 1859, and the stable of titles published by Harper’s in New York, such as Harper’s Bazaar (from 1867). Similar expansion took place in titles intended for occupational groupings such as engineers or schoolteachers; and cascades of cheaper materials were directed at the middle classes and artisans, pioneered by Charles Knight and his Penny Magazine, William and Robert Chambers’s Chambers’s Journal, and Lord Brougham’s pamphlets from the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.48 All took advantage of the rapidly diversifying audiences, incomes, and inclinations that were exposed to view when the last remnants of publishing taxes were lifted in the 1850s and excise duty on paper was abolished in 1860. Soon, an entrepreneurial newsagent, William Henry Smith, started up business in the Strand in London’s urban centre. Anyone walking into Smith’s shop in 1860 could find 150 different newspapers and magazines for sale every week. W. H. Smith’s railway bookstalls and circulating library followed shortly after.49 Mudie’s Circulating Library pursued the same successful trajectory.
Much of Darwin’s sudden impact—and his continuing impact—was the result of having produced a book of wide general interest just as this wave of periodical reading matter burst into nineteenth-century homes. His volume was subjected to more popular attention than almost any other scientific book. Even Vestiges’ huge circulation figures pale beside the multitude of public arenas in which the Origin of Species ultimately made an appearance.50 Before the end of Darwin’s life, the Origin had been discussed in more than one hundred journals and newspapers in Britain alone, ranging from the Daily Telegraph to the Economist, Family Herald, Punch, and the Roman Catholic Tablet.51
As was usual at that time, the majority of these reviews were unsigned, a stylistic device ostensibly intended to permit freedom of speech, but more usually exploited as an opportunity for unattributed criticism or unabashed self-promotion, sometimes achieved by authors fulsomely reviewing their own books. Actual anonymity was always relative. Only one reviewer, for example, eluded Darwin’s hunt for identities during December 1859. This was the clever writer in the Saturday Review. Darwin would have liked to know who he was. He made pertinent remarks about geology and seemed to know a fair bit about natural history. The author has not been traced to this day (though he could well have been Thomas Rymer Jones). These reviewers—mostly men—were almost inevitably drawn from the literary stratum of London, men of letters who were able to earn a living at their trade and also enjoy the respect of intellectual society. It is a measure of Darwin’s lengthy social tentacles, and the tightly confined elite reviewing circle to which he belonged, that out of forty-three substantial reviews of the Origin of Species written before the end of 1860, only six authors, including the mysterious Saturday Review critic, remained unidentified by him.52
A tidal wave of books and commentaries was to come later. For the time being, Darwin began collecting the reviews of his Origin, systematically tearing articles out of magazines and newspapers, scribbling comments in the margins or on slips of paper pinned to the text, intending to talk them over with Lyell and other friends and keep them for future revisions. Many came to him as offprints bound in paper wrappers or in the original volumes of those journals to which he subscribed. Tidy-minded as always, he arranged them by size on his study bookshelves—quarto or octavo, each numbered in sequence, the newspaper clippings stashed away in a drawer for Parslow or the children to glue into leather-bound albums for him at their leisure. He compiled an index for ease of access.
The outpouring of comment—good, bad, and never indifferent—scarcely diminished over the next two or three years, providing the startled author with a remarkable documentary repository
of the widest possible range of opinion drawn from the widest possible spectrum of readers. Darwin’s collection eventually amounted to 347 reviews and 1,571 general articles, as well as 336 items kept separately because of their large size. He maintained two hefty volumes of newspaper clippings.53 Across the top of a handlist prepared for him by his son Francis later in life, he noted bitterly: “Some of the most absurd or unjust articles were by Harvey & Westwood in G. Chronicle 1860s, Wollaston in Annals & Mag of Natural History & Houghton & Owen, see remarks on latter in Saturday Review.—Hopkins in Fraser says my view differs in nothing from Lamarck.”54
This private brooding over his book’s reception stood at odds with his external demeanour. “There has been a plethora of reviews, and I am really quite sick of myself.”
V
All the while, Huxley’s brio knew no bounds. These six months after publication were as much his as they were Darwin’s. Enthusiastically he accepted commissions all over the place for talks and reviews, rapidly creating a public profile for himself as a major proponent of the new ideas. It is not known for sure when he first described himself as Darwin’s “bulldog,” but he certainly used the expression in the 1870s.55 After writing the anonymous review for the Times he declared to Hooker that “whatever they do, they shall respect Darwin and be d—d to them.”56
Even so, it is not completely clear just how much some of Huxley’s earliest activities actually helped Darwin along.57 In London in February 1860 he delivered a show-stopping Royal Institution lecture on Darwin’s theory during which he pulled a handful of flapping pigeons out of a wicker basket like a conjurer for the occasion. Darwin had pinned high hopes on the evening. Royal Institution audiences usually included an influential mix of fashion and brains, and Huxley had done well to get the topic onto the winter programme, which mostly relayed recent advances in physics and chemistry to the intelligentsia. Darwin made a special trip to London to attend and arranged for his poultry friends to supply the magician’s basket of pigeons. Afterwards he wished Huxley had refrained from pointing out all the difficulties of natural selection quite so efficiently. Loyally describing it as “very fine & very bold,” Darwin privately considered it a hollow triumph. “Huxley made a great failure of the R.I. lecture,” Hooker explained sotto voce to Asa Gray, “which was a great pity, as he intended to have backed the book but unfortunately managed to damage it.”58
The situation did not improve much when Huxley published his next review, his third on the Origin of Species in as many months, this time for the Westminster Review. He had studied the book thoughtfully in the interval. In the Westminster he gave his verdict as a professional naturalist by admitting he could not fully accept the principle of natural selection.59 Despite all the merits that he freely acknowledged, his deep admiration for Darwin’s theory, and his expressions of commitment to the overall thrust of the volume, he felt the case must ultimately remain unproven until Darwin showed how varieties turned into reproductively self-contained species. What could possibly make them become infertile with their closest relatives? he asked. To Huxley’s mind this breeding problem was almost insuperable, and he was never satisfied by the compromise solutions offered by Darwin. As for himself, Darwin wished Huxley could concentrate rather more on the good points brought forward in the Origin. Huxley did not advertise the marvels of embryology, for example, in the way that he was well qualified to do. Applause in that quarter, Darwin thought, would help his cause materially. “Embryology is my pet bit in my book, and, confound my friends, not one has noticed this to me,” he grumbled to Hooker.60
On the other hand, Huxley welcomed the Origin of Species as ammunition for promoting science at the expense of the church, and the principles of naturalism over theologically based concepts. Fat purple-clad bishops were to him an irresistible quarry. The ensuing review in the Westminster was the most powerful ever written in Darwin’s defence. The Origin was a “veritable Whitworth gun in the armory of liberalism,” Huxley declared. “What is the history of every science but the elimination of the notion of mystery or creative interferences?” He claimed that Darwin’s book swept away old-fashioned theological obfuscation.
Who shall number the patient and earnest seekers after truth from the days of Galileo until now, whose lives have been embittered and their good name blasted by the mistaken zeal of Bibliolaters?… It is true that if philosophers have suffered, their cause has been amply avenged. Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules, and history records that whenever science and dogmatism have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed, if not annihilated; scotched if not slain.61
With rhetoric like this blaring from the Westminster’s pages, Huxley intentionally began to construct a Darwinian attack on terms that he favoured. He called on the imagery of warfare to make his point, talking of a battle between science and religion, between faith and reason, old against new, stultifying tradition holding back innovation. Recklessly he propelled Darwin and Darwin’s book into the centre of the changing times. Warfare presented a specially vivid image to a nation steeped in the dreadful aftermath of the Crimea, still reeling from the Sepoy uprising, and fretting on a daily basis about the possibility of invasion from France. Every young man who joined the Volunteer movement in those years, who armed himself to the teeth with a pitchfork or rabbiting gun, who drilled in uniform and boots and was fully prepared to defend British countryside against French infantrymen or die in fields of waving corn, could identify with Huxley’s oratory. To liken Darwin to a Whitworth gun—the most advanced weapon then developed in Britain—was a compliment with immediate relevance. Individually, too, Huxley’s whole existence seemed to revolve around battle: battles against unfavourable family circumstances, battles against snobbery, battles against reactionary scientists, or those he considered oily or dishonest. Huxley was quick to take offence, always argumentative and ready to fight.62 Sometimes taken aback by Huxley’s keenness in this direction, Darwin would joke that his friend’s spirits picked up wonderfully if a row was in the offing.63 The image of warfare reflected the man’s chosen path through life.
At home, Darwin felt a twinge of embarrassment to be the focus of so much eloquence. “A brilliant review by Huxley with capital hits,” he remarked to Lyell. “But I do not know that he much advances subject.”
Every grain in the balance, he said, was beginning to count. Serious criticisms were emerging. Francis Bowen in the North American Review was “clever & dead against me”; François Pictet in the Swiss Bibliotheque Universelle opposed him, although “most candid & fair”; John Duns in the North British Review declared “its publication is a mistake”; and Samuel Haughton, in the Dublin Natural History Review, accused Darwin of doing no more than reviving Lamarck’s theory.64 Word got round that the great John Herschel called natural selection the law of higgledy-piggledy. “What exactly this means I do not know,” wailed Darwin, “but it is evidently very contemptuous.”65 A note from William Whewell confirmed the cautious Cambridge response. Anecdote had it that Whewell refused to allow a copy of the Origin of Species to be placed in the library of Trinity College.66
All these comments came from men who were highly regarded in their own fields. Not surprisingly, Darwin found the situation disheartening. He especially caught his breath over a review by Thomas Wollaston in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History. Before this, he had hoped Wollaston would go some of the way with him, for the entomologist was flexible in his attitude to species, flexible enough to have bantered with Darwin about transmutation at a weekend party at Down in 1856 when the guests “made light of all species & grew more & more unorthodox.”67 Instead Wollaston was furious. He ignored the book’s best points, said that Darwin did not understand the definition of species, complained about the personification of selection, and dwelled, like Huxley, on the difficulties: “Would not one step more plunge us headlong into the Nebular Hypothe
sis and the whole theory of Spontaneous Generation?”68 Wollaston could see no reason to abandon the idea of divine creation and plenty of dangers in any alternative. Darwin said it was perfectly clear to him that the review was by Wollaston. The text was “so full of parentheses” it could not be by anyone else. “The stones are beginning to fly,” he told Hooker.
Similarly dismissive opinions surfaced in a range of other periodicals. The Christian Observer insisted that domestic animals varied only because God made them capable of doing so. The Rambler, a liberal Catholic journal, rebuked Darwin for philosophising in areas where science ought not to trespass. The British Quarterly uneasily indulged in a monstrous fantasy in which a monkey proposed marriage to a dainty young lady in a crinoline—a notion guaranteed to strike horror into the moral heart of Victorians. Aghast at the theological implications of a natural origin for species, the physician Charles Robert Bree promptly issued a pamphlet, Species not transmutable, nor the result of secondary causes; being a critical examination of Mr. Darwin’s work entitled “Origin and Variation of Species.” In this pamphlet Bree hinted that Darwin must have invented the “celebrated cleric,” cited in the second edition of the Origin of Species: Bree thought no priest worth his cloth could possibly claim that evolution was compatible with Christianity. Aghast, in his turn, at the accusation of lying, Darwin retorted that Bree “has not the soul of a gentleman in him.”69