Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  Even in those quarters where he most hoped he would be read sympathetically, Darwin came up against sharp resistance. Geologists were quick to point out the errors in a particular example he had given to indicate the vast age of the earth. In the Origin Darwin suggested that the original chalk beds of the Cretaceous period that had once covered the Weald, in Kent, could have been eroded at the rate of one inch per century, indicating that the process took some 300 million years.70 “I have been rash and unguarded in the calculation,” he admitted afterwards, anxiously consulting Andrew Ramsay and Joseph Beete Jukes, both of the Geological Survey. John Phillips, the professor of geology at Oxford University and president of the Geological Society of London, slammed Darwin’s figures in his annual address to the fellows of the society, leading Darwin to halve his estimate in the second edition of the Origin, and omit the case entirely in the third.71 This was public ignominy. He said to Lyell that he had “burnt his fingers so consumedly.”72

  Not to be outdone, Adam Sedgwick discharged an unsigned tirade in the Spectator, the second article about Darwin’s book in the Spectator in the space of six months, reiterating the position he had declared by letter to Darwin at Ilkley. “You cannot make a good rope out of a string of air bubbles,” Sedgwick proclaimed.73 He detested the theory’s “unflinching materialism.”74 Marching out of his college to the lecture room, Sedgwick proceeded to let off steam on his university students. That spring he set an examination paper for his Cambridge finalists, in which to pass every candidate needed to demolish the Origin of Species.

  Explain what has been understood by the theory of development and transmutation. Give a short synopsis of Darwin’s published views on this theory pointing out how far they are to be regarded as inductive, and how far as hypothetical.75

  The continued attention also sparked a different kind of reaction—one that hinged on Darwin’s sudden renown. During those early months, several people claimed to have thought of natural selection first. Patrick Matthew, an obscure but fiery political writer, wrote to the London magazines to draw attention to his book Naval Timber and Arboriculture, published in 1831, in which he had indeed described the mechanism of natural selection. “Erasmus always said that surely this would be shown to be the case someday,” confessed Darwin.76 Yet Darwin had never heard of Matthew, telling friends that a treatise on naval timber was way off his usual reading track. He took steps to deal with this source of possible controversy quickly and cleanly. He wrote a brief response for publication and made his excuses politely. The last thing he wanted was another priority dispute. Undaunted, Matthew capitalised on the connection for several years afterwards, much to Darwin’s private irritation. Perversely, Darwin cheered up when it became apparent that Matthew was not the only precursor. An eighteenth-century doctor called William Wells was also shown to have described the principle of natural selection in an essay attached to a larger volume, an Essay on Dew (1818). Darwin had missed this one too. With some satisfaction he reported to Hooker: “So poor old Patrick Matthew is not the first, and he cannot, or ought not, any longer to put on his title-pages ‘Discoverer of the Principle of Natural Selection.’ ”77

  A month or so after Matthew made himself known, an Irish doctor, Henry Freke, also claimed priority over Darwin, saying he had published in 1851 an account of animals and plants evolving from a single filament of organised matter. He sent a copy of his article to Down House, but it was so densely metaphysical that anyone might be forgiven for not spotting that it was about evolution: the London Review despairingly noted Freke’s “verbose, elliptical, repetitive diction.” Darwin had overlooked this article as well. “Dr Freke has sent me his paper—which is far beyond my scope.”78 Still, he was not particularly bothered by these precursors who were of such a different mould from Wallace. It seemed to him—probably rightly—that they intended drawing attention to themselves through the publicity surrounding the Origin of Species.

  When the satires started, it was a sure sign of controversy brewing. “I have received in a Manchester newspaper a rather good squib that I have proved ‘might is right’ & therefore that Napoleon is right & every cheating tradesman is also right,” he reported to Lyell.79 The squib rang true enough. To apply natural selection to the human race was an obvious step from Darwin’s argument for animals and plants, a step that nearly everyone was willing to make in print except for the author.

  Manchester gave way to Dublin, the traditional home of satirical pamphlets. Hooker’s friend the Quaker botanist William Henry Harvey published a squib for his students at Trinity College Dublin that tore into natural selection and compared humanised frogs to slavering toadies. Harvey’s humour was so curt in places that Hooker did not pass a copy of the squib on to Darwin. Circumspectly, he revealed the pamphlet’s existence only when Harvey later admitted that there might be some value in natural selection. Before then Harvey wrote long letters to Darwin relaying esoteric theological points and delivered a crushing review in the Gardeners’ Chronicle. Since the origin of variation remained unknown, Harvey argued, variability at least must be a miraculous event.80 Darwin felt the blow hard. Harvey’s and Wollaston’s comments irked him much more than they should have. “Theology has more to do with these two attacks than science,” he explained to Hooker.

  Then Dublin gave way to London, as the humorous magazine Punch opened its long and abundantly fertile association with Darwinism. The animal lurking inside human beings was obvious, screeched Punch with delight. Slimy reptiles, old ducks, serpents in the grass: all these were alive and well in fashionable Belgravia. The hazardous process of choosing a spouse appeared soon after. A Punch satire entitled “Unnatural selection and improvement of Species” matched fat with thin, tall with short, sweet young lassies with sour old men.81

  At Down House, eight pages of anonymous botanical verse arrived, neatly copied out so that Darwin could not recognise the handwriting, quizzing and praising the theory alternately. Did eccentric old Dr. Boott ever write poems? he asked Hooker. This book of his, he caught himself thinking, was certainly producing an extraordinary range of responses.

  VI

  The Edinburgh was harshest of all. In the April 1860 number, Richard Owen exploded in a long, malevolent anonymous review, an article he must have been composing when he talked to Darwin in London. Owen dealt with nine other books and papers in the same review, one of which was Hooker’s 1859 essay on Tasmanian plants, in which Hooker attempted to use Darwin’s and Wallace’s ideas to explain the relationships of antipodean plant species.82 All Owen’s complex grievances poured out, the thwarted natural history museum among them. He was simultaneously scornful, condescending, rude, and astute.

  Of course he was critical. Darwin predicted as much from their conversation in London. Nevertheless every word was a shock. Owen did not mention Genesis—he was no fundamentalist Bible-thumper. Instead, he insisted that natural selection was incapable of doing what Darwin suggested. He dwelled on alternatives, such as anatomical archetypes and underlying plans of creation. He discussed the first, possibly spontaneous, origins of life. Under the guise of an impartial, anonymous third party, he intimated that Professor Owen had already pondered these issues and had come to wiser, altogether more philosophical conclusions.

  On and on it went, slicing up Darwin like any carcass on an anatomist’s dissecting table. Owen reduced Darwin’s facts to nonsense. He doubted Darwin’s competence. He took issue with definitions. He ridiculed Darwin’s literary style. He sneered at Darwin’s friends, swiping at Huxley’s Royal Institution lecture and taking unpleasant aim at Hooker—“one of the disciples”—and called Hooker as short-sighted as his master. Bears swimming around in search of fish could not metamorphose into whales: “we look in vain for any instance of hypothetical transmutation in Lamarck so gross as the one above cited.”

  By chance, Hooker and Huxley were staying with Darwin for the weekend when this review was published. The three of them were astonished as they turned the pages. Further
and further they read, Huxley and Hooker incredulously repeating passages out loud, Darwin anxiously wincing. It was good that they were together. Caught off guard in the countryside, each conscious that they had been publicly humiliated in turn, they united in the face of a common enemy.

  “It is extremely malignant, clever & I fear will be very damaging,” Darwin protested in a letter to Lyell that evening. “He is atrociously severe on Huxley’s lecture, & very bitter against Hooker.… Makes me say that the dorsal vertebrae of pigeons vary and refers to page where the word dorsal does not appear. Sneers at my saying a certain organ is the branchiae of Balanidae; whilst in his own Invertebrata published before I published on cirripedes, he calls them organs without doubt branchiae.”83

  Hooker and Huxley urged Darwin to write an answer, even if only to point out the factual distortions. And Darwin aggressively rattled his sword for a while. He was taken aback by the naked unpleasantness of a supposed friend—that and what he imagined was duplicity. “What a base dog he is. Some of my relations say it cannot possibly be Owen’s article, because the reviewer speaks so very highly of Prof. Owen. Poor dear simple folk!”

  With the visitors gone, and left on his own to reread the review, his response was far more predictable. Admittedly he gave himself the passing gratification of scrawling tetchy remarks in the margins (“False,” “false”). But he never seriously contemplated a response. That night he vowed never to answer Owen. In truth he found the decision difficult: he believed that he was unjustly treated. He believed his work deserved a fair hearing from those who were most qualified to comment, not a tirade such as this. Yet he came to the conclusion that dignified silence was far the best course. He was too accustomed to withdrawing from unpleasant confrontations to begin open combat now.

  Underneath, however, he was aggrieved. What went for reticence and cautious modesty, in this regard, was perhaps merely the polite face of sullen dislike and scarcely acknowledged feelings of aggression. Years of friendship evidently stood for naught. Years of scientific intimacy were meaningless. “It is painful to be hated in the intense degree with which Owen hates me.”

  In retrospect there can be little doubt that Darwin exaggerated the situation. He let himself get carried away on a tide of hostility and squeezed it all down into a resentful simmer that continued more or less until the day he died.84 What he could not forgive was the jibing at his competence—precisely what Owen could not forgive either. Stung as he was, Darwin came to realise that his theory really would divide the world of natural science, really would turn friends into deadly foes. From then on, he knew there would always somewhere be an enemy. “I am thrashed in every possible way,” he remarked to Murray a few days later.

  Thereafter, Darwin looked at Huxley’s writings with new respect, recognising the bitter antagonism against Owen that fuelled him. “Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules,” he read again in the Westminster. Absolutely splendid, he declared with a rush of emotion.

  VII

  Another review was destined to have a rather different impact. Whitwell Elwin, editor of the Quarterly Review, did not care for Darwin’s argument in the Origin of Species any more now than when he had first read it in manuscript for John Murray. Ever since the Origin’s publication he had been searching for someone who would deliver it a crushing blow. He found his reviewer in Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford.

  Furthermore, Elwin was simultaneously looking for a reviewer for the unconventional volume Essays and Reviews, a book that had been published in March 1860.85 This was written by seven eminent divines who actively deconstructed the Bible. “Seven against Christ,” screamed the first reviews; “a work of destruction,” pronounced the Athenaeum. Elwin, like many of his contemporaries, was shocked at seeing reputable churchmen apparently cutting away at the foundations of Anglican belief. One essayist denied salvation; another claimed miracles could not occur; yet another that faith should be strong enough to stand alone without the Bible or church doctrine.86 Although the authors put into words only what some factions of the established church had long said in private about the metaphorical nature of the New Testament and compression of time in Genesis—issues that had been discussed at least since Strauss’s pioneering Life of Jesus—the commotion at seeing such subtle and apparently heterodox thought broadcast in print was immense. Victorian science was intimately wrapped up in the ensuing turmoil. The church authorities clearly felt that such unfettered liberal ideas would lead towards heresy, perhaps even atheism, with all that this threatened for the traditional status quo.87 Rationalism was a dangerous pursuit, churchmen like Elwin thundered from their village pulpits. Not willing to be overwhelmed by these blasts from the altar, many ordinary people welcomed the idea of free inquiry into religious matters and cast a cynical eye on the church’s stuffy conventions. Nevertheless, Elwin viewed Essays and Reviews and the Origin of Species with horrified dismay. He thought each volume concealed beneath its innocent cloth covers dangerously subversive tendencies.

  Somewhat unexpectedly, Murray at first thought Huxley might review the Origin of Species for the Quarterly and recommended him to Elwin.88 Then Elwin toyed with the thought of doing it himself, always the best way for an editor to get the review he really wants. Yet he seized gratefully on Murray’s next suggestion—Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and son of the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, well known for his intelligent interest in natural science and already an occasional writer for the Quarterly.

  If anyone could have stepped out of a Trollope novel at this point it was Wilberforce. A bulky, vigorous, self-assured man, he was widely tipped to become a future Archbishop of Canterbury. Like his fictional counterpart Archdeacon Grantly of Barchester, Wilberforce’s worldly ambitions were all too obvious. He relished his acquaintance with William Gladstone, the member of Parliament for Oxford University, and with Prince Albert. He enjoyed sitting on the bishops’ bench in the House of Lords. He participated in clerical in-fighting with a satisfaction that unashamedly coloured his diocesan activities.89 By popular account Trollope had taken him as the prototype for the energetically domineering archdeacon in the Barchester series. Real life was hardly less droll. Known to the public as Soapy Sam, Wilberforce would explain that the nickname came from his often getting into hot water but always coming out clean. Less charitably his opponents claimed he was too slippery to catch any hold. To Elwin’s gratification, he agreed to review both books for the Quarterly.

  Many delays followed. The bishop was preoccupied with the first ecclesiastical stirrings against Essays and Reviews.90 Not least of his problems was the fact that five of the seven reverend authors were Oxford men ostensibly under Wilberforce’s theological jurisdiction, including such leading figures in the university as Benjamin Jowett, Mark Pattison, and Baden Powell. Wilberforce felt he needed to take a strong line against these errant members of his flock. His fiercest contempt was reserved for the “scarcely veiled atheism of Mr. Baden Powell,” the Oxford professor of geometry, an ordained priest who in his contribution to the volume calmly refuted all Paley’s traditional evidence for the existence of God. Furthermore, Baden Powell mentioned Darwin’s Origin of Species favourably. This was “a masterly volume,” said Powell, “a work which must soon bring about an entire revolution of opinion in favour of the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature.”91 Powell died very soon after Essays and Reviews was published. Had he lived, Wilberforce thought, he could well have got him prosecuted for ecclesiastical heresy. Luckily for Powell, death conveniently removed him from the bishop’s theological firing line.

  When Wilberforce turned to the Origin of Species he naturally viewed it in the same incendiary light. He submitted a review to the Quarterly that was decidedly against Darwin, written with a witty punch that made it the unmistakable product of his pen. He wrote candidly about evolution’s dangers. “Now we must say at once and openly … that such a not
ion is absolutely incompatible not only with single expressions in the word of God but with the whole representation of that moral and spiritual condition of man which is its proper subject matter.”92 He reminded readers of Darwin’s “ingenious grandsire,” the first Erasmus Darwin, and quoted a satirical passage from the Anti-Jacobin directed against Erasmus Darwin’s evolutionising, where lazy monkey-men might accidentally rub off their tails by sitting round the cave fire all day long. He poked fun at the Origin’s facts, reducing them to absurdities. “Now all this is very pleasant writing, especially for pigeon-fanciers,” he sniffed comically.93

  However, he included some specialised anatomical arguments which must have originated from discussions with his friend Richard Owen. Here and there, Wilberforce slipped in Owenite barbs—Darwin’s disinclination to mention precursors, for example, and his tendency to depend on individual avowals, “I believe,” and “I trust.” These came directly from Owen’s unpleasant review in the Edinburgh.

  Glad enough to have his pages filled, Elwin arranged to run it in the forthcoming July 1860 issue of the Quarterly. “I think our next number will be sufficiently modern,” he reported to Murray.

  VIII

  Matters quickly came to a head. Six months of reviews and increasing private tension within the intellectual community culminated in an explosive debate about the Origin of Species at the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting held in Oxford in June 1860. The confrontation was not so much in itself. Bishop Wilberforce argued with Huxley. Huxley argued with Bishop Wilberforce. Underneath, however, the fight was seen as centring on who had the right to explain the origin of living beings—should it be theologians or scientists? At a stroke, Darwin’s book, and Darwin’s theory, became public property, and the event was to etch itself into the collective memory as a defining moment in Victorian history, one that exposed the painful questions about faith and the position of mankind with which the nation was struggling. While the Origin did not generate these questions, this Oxford meeting brought them into the open. And the debate between Huxley and Wilberforce famously came to symbolise the perceived conflict between science and religion, such a powerful contemporary image that it, in turn, contributed materially to the doubts that many Victorians felt about their faith, while reinforcing the convictions of as many others.94 Although Darwin had gone to such trouble to banish apes and angels from his text, they were present at Oxford, moving their feet restlessly, itching to take over.