Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  George Henry Lewes came to much the same conclusion when discussing the theory of natural selection in his Animal Life, published in 1862.58 “It may be true but we cannot say that it is true,” he reported. Lewes and Eliot were familiar with many of the people involved in the evolutionary debate, especially with Herbert Spencer, a close friend, and they both to some degree had adopted Spencer’s doctrines before the Origin was published. Lewes, a good naturalist in his own right, was at this point composing an ambitious account of the principles of animal physiology drawing on several of Spencer’s concepts; and Eliot in her novels dwelled affectingly on the tangled course of human society. Lewes and Eliot had sat up reading the Origin together shortly after it was published. “Though full of interesting matter, it is not impressive, from want of luminous and orderly presentation,” Eliot commented in a letter.59 Yet she drew on Darwin as subtly as any other. She made creative use of her wider understanding of evolutionary development in The Mill on the Floss (1860) and then wove stories around heredity for Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda.60 Lewes assented to the main thrust of Darwin’s arguments, although he explicitly linked them with Spencer’s themes.

  It was, however, Friedrich Max Müller, the philologist, who pushed Darwin’s theories beyond the world of the creative imagination into grand questions of human identity. In the winter season of 1861–62 he galvanised high society with lectures at the Royal Institution on the origin of languages. Müller forced his audience to think carefully about what it is to be human. Had the language of primitive mankind developed from imitations of natural sounds? He thought not. Instead, Müller championed the idea that words were inseparably related to mental concepts. Words served as symbols for things, and there could be no thought without the language to express it. He said it was therefore impossible for language to arise by natural development out of the vocalisations of animals precisely because animals did not possess human concepts. “Language is something more palpable than a fold of the brain, or an angle of the skull,” he announced.61

  Even so, Müller praised other aspects of Darwin’s theory, applying the idea of natural selection to the genealogy of ancient languages, as the leading German philologist August Schleicher was to appreciate.62 Darwin took Müller seriously. He read the printed version of the lectures and discussed them with Hensleigh Wedgwood, the family philologist. “I quite agree that it is extremely interesting,” he said of Müller’s thesis.63 Hensleigh thought that human speech could only have emerged bit by bit from animal sounds, a point of view that matched Darwin’s ideas. “H. says [Max Müller] is all wrong & has partly converted Papa to that opinion,” said Emma in a letter to William.64

  Quietly, the Origin of Species crept into the thoughts of Elizabeth Gaskell. She brooded on what she knew of Darwin’s life story, attracted by the tale of the Beagle voyage and the possibilities of setting a novel around the pleasant trope of a natural history collector unknowingly capturing a woman’s heart. Her meditations carried a personal element. The Gaskell family were distantly related to the Darwins (via the Hollands), and although Mrs. Gaskell did not know Darwin or Emma at all well, probably meeting them only once or twice in as many decades, she was intimate with Hensleigh and Fanny Wedgwood, often sending her daughters Meta and Marianne over to visit the Wedgwood girls. She also knew others in their social circle, like Harriet Martineau and Erasmus Darwin. Meta Gaskell sometimes accompanied the Wedgwood daughters to Down House to stay with their cousins Henrietta and Bessy Darwin. One of those occasions was remembered by Darwin simply because he managed to conquer Meta Gaskell at chess. Julia Wedgwood worked with Elizabeth Gaskell on her biography of Charlotte Brontë.65

  It was about now that Mrs. Gaskell created Roger Hamley, the hero of Wives and Daughters, basing him loosely on Darwin. The story was unfinished at her death, although most of it was published as a serial in the Cornhill Magazine from 1864. Darwin’s fictional counterpart was a shyly agreeable character, a naturalist and traveller returned, a man whose heart was given to the loving investigation of nature, an experimenter who respected his subject matter. Science, even of the most unsettling kind, could still present a humane and generous face.

  VIII

  Near and far, people actively engaged with his text. In Boston, Theodore Parker, the Unitarian divine, amusingly presented “A Bumblebee’s Thoughts on the Plan and Purpose of the Universe.” In nearby Concord, Henry David Thoreau experienced the Origin of Species as a revelatory text. Asa Gray had arranged this transatlantic meeting of minds by sending a copy up to Concord with his brother-in-law Charles Brace. “Never had Thoreau been so captivated by a project,” noted William Howarth.66 Thoreau’s early death in 1862 left his views on Darwin’s work tantalisingly unformed.

  Yet the community of transcendentalists was well disposed to at least some of the Origin of Species’ proposals. Thoreau apparently discussed theories of development and evolution with Emerson, who was himself inclined to appreciate some form of progression in nature. Before the Origin of Species was published, Emerson had talked with Moncure Daniel Conway, the Protestant theologian, about progressive development in nature, where evolution might represent the gradual freeing of human beings from their animal roots, ultimately leading “to a godly state.” Conway wondered whether the existence of evil might perhaps reside in those animal roots. He preached a sermon in Ohio about Darwin in December 1859. “This formidable man … did not mean to give dogmatic Christianity its deathblow; he meant to utter a simple theory of nature.”67

  A trio of Australian museum men, Ferdinand Mueller, Frederick McCoy, and William MacLeay, were less easy to satisfy. Each condemned evolution outright. MacLeay politely acknowledged his acquaintance with Darwin from their London days. Nevertheless, “I am utterly opposed to Darwin’s or rather Lamarck’s theory.” McCoy refused to let Darwin’s books—even his innocuous Journal of a Naturalist—into the National Museum in Melbourne. If any Melbourne resident wished to consult a public copy of the Origin of Species, he or she had to travel to Sydney, where a solitary volume stood on the shelves of the Mechanics’ School of Arts library.68 And in a little-known burst of museum madness McCoy spent several years fruitlessly attempting to get hold of one of Paul Du Chaillu’s gorilla skins in order to stage an exhibit in the Melbourne Museum. One look at the beast, he confidently predicted, would convince anyone that evolution was nonsense. On the other side of the globe, John William Dawson, of McGill University in Montreal, unleashed such a torrent of palaeontological invective that Hooker remarked that “he seems to hate Darwinism.”69

  Even royal minds addressed the question of natural selection in the privacy of family apartments. Queen Victoria spoke for thousands of her subjects when she congratulated her eldest daughter on her fortitude in grappling with the Origin of Species. “How many interesting, difficult books you read,” she told Vicky, the crown princess of Prussia, in 1862. “It would and will please beloved Papa.”70

  All this for a man who would not—or could not—make a public appearance. In February 1861, John Lubbock stood up in front of Darwin’s friends and neighbours at a meeting of the Bromley Literary Institute to explain the absent author’s theories of evolution by natural selection.71

  IX

  The orchid book was published in May 1862 under the title On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing. Darwin chose the word “contrivances” specially to indicate that there was no purposeful design in the natural world, although in retrospect it was a word no less imbued with intent than “adaptation.”

  When this or that part has been spoken of as adapted for some special purpose, it must not be supposed that it was originally always formed for this sole purpose. The regular course of events seems to be, that a part which originally served for one purpose, becomes adapted by slow changes for widely different purposes.… On the same principle, if a man were to make a machine for some special purpose, but were to use old wh
eels, springs, and pulleys, only slightly altered, the whole machine, with all its parts, might be said to be specially contrived for its present purpose. Thus throughout nature almost every part of each living being has probably served, in a slightly modified condition, for diverse purposes, and has acted in the living machinery of many ancient and distinct specific forms.72

  Murray gave the book a decorative plum binding (the only one of the Murray Darwins not to appear in green) and embellished the cover with a gilt Cycnoches, chosen for its bold outline. Before then Darwin had issued a welter of instructions about the printing and type size, supervising the woodcuts with a sharp eye for detail, hurrying the compositors along, even specifying that “fertilisation” should be spelled with an s, not a z. He told Murray that he hoped the book would appear sufficently modest. He did not wish to deceive readers into thinking they were buying a lavishly illustrated tome on the orchid fancy. This time he thanked his helpers generously in print.

  But he felt oddly nervous about publishing, wondering if he was making a fool of himself.

  The subject is, I fear, too complex for the public & I fear I have made a great mistake in not keeping to my first intention of sending it to Linnean Soc.; but it is now too late, & I must make the best of a bad job.73

  However he ventured to tell Murray that “I think this little volume will do good to the Origin, as it will show that I have worked hard at details.”74

  Despite the worries, the results impressed his botanical friends. They noted Darwin’s talent for observation. “It is a very extraordinary book!” declared Oliver. “What a new field for observing the wonderful provisions of nature you have opened up,” said Bentham. “What a skill & genius you have for these researches. I have tonight learned more than I ever knew before,” echoed Gray. From the breezy flatlands of Cambridgeshire, Charles Babington (Darwin’s old beetle-collecting rival and now Cambridge professor of botany after Henslow), who was no friend of natural selection, stiffly relayed the news that he thought the book “exceedingly interesting & valuable.” Hooker practically burst. “You are out of sight the best physiological observer and experimenter that Botany ever saw.” What they recognised, perhaps for the first time, was Darwin’s ability to identify what might be valuable in a wide range of differing phenomena and concentrate intently enough on it to see what could constitute the whole solution to the problem in his head.

  This orchid book tipped some of the more traditionally minded botanists onto Darwin’s side. Admittedly, there was something about nineteenth-century science that enabled British botanists to contemplate evolution in plants far more calmly than zoologists regarded evolution in animals. The rooted nature of plants, their lack of feeling, their dependence on the environment, their obvious fluctuations in numbers, perhaps made the possibility of their evolution a little easier to accept. “Bentham and Oliver are quite struck up in a heap with your book & delighted beyond expression,” reported Hooker, glad to see two leading figures capitulate to natural selection.

  Bentham made his views known in his 1862 presidential address to the Linnean Society, and again the following year in a valedictory address to the same society. He alluded to John Stuart Mill’s verdict. “Mr Darwin has shown how specific changes may take place,” he remarked. “His is not therefore a theory capable of proof, but ‘an unimpeachable example of a legitimate hypothesis’ requiring verification, as defined by J. S. Mill in his excellent chapter on Hypothesis.”75 This endorsement from the presidential chair made its mark on the Linnean fellows. In turn, Miles Berkeley, Charles Naudin, Alphonse de Candolle, Jean Louis Quatrefages, and Charles Daubeny began to think there might be something in what Darwin proposed after all. Lyell said that next to the Origin of Species, he considered Orchids the most valuable of all Darwin’s works.76

  Elsewhere, silence reigned. Darwin’s choice of subject matter baffled Victorian readers panting for gorillas and cavemen. His book looked quaint. While the Times roared against Huxley’s support for “Mr. Darwin’s mischievous theory,” the source of the controversy appeared to have strolled into a greenhouse. Except for a few reviews in gardening magazines, scarcely any learned appraisals appeared. Few zoologists or natural philosophers noticed the volume. It sold rather too slowly for Murray’s comfort.

  And in an irritating reversal of Darwin’s intentions, one or two commentators misunderstood his theme and treated the book as a testament to God’s marvellous ingenuity. The Literary Churchman obstinately closed a review with the words “O Lord, how manifold are Thy works.”77 Charles Kingsley said it presented “a most valuable addition to natural theology,” telling Huxley that the wisest God was the one who could make all things make themselves.78

  Worst of all, in Darwin’s eyes, the writer and statesman George Douglas Campbell, the eighth Duke of Argyll and lord privy seal, decided to speak out. Argyll was a cultivated man, well versed in the sciences. “I have read Darwin with great interest,” he told his friend Richard Owen.79 Nonetheless he considered Darwin’s explanations for orchids “the vaguest and most unsatisfactory conjectures.” The metaphysical points about adaptive design and perfection that he then made in the Edinburgh Review were too high-flown for Darwin fully to grasp. “The Duke of Argyll has written an article on Supernaturalism in the Ed. rev,” said Emma in November 1862.

  He is quite opposed to your father’s views but he praises the Orchids in such an enthusiastic way that he will do it a good turn. The article is so obscure I cd. not understand it. Hensleigh & Snow have written an article in Macmillan on Max Muller & that I suspect is equally obscure.80

  Argyll proposed that God made orchid flowers in such a way that humans could explain them in human terms. He went on to develop his thoughts on this kind of creative evolutionism in an influential manner over the next few years, ultimately becoming an important commentator on the ancestry of mankind. Argyll particularly ridiculed Darwin’s description of the long nectary of Angraecum sesquipedale and the missing moth needed to fertilise it. “Contemptuous,” muttered Darwin defensively. “Very clever, but not convincing to me.”81 Darwin recollected that he had once met Argyll at a smart dinner party in London, although he had barely spoken to him.82

  So he allowed himself a shiver of satisfaction when an anonymous writer launched a retaliatory attack on the duke in the Saturday Review.83 Emma and he enjoyed the brio of the article and sent it to Hooker, who declared it “perfect.” The shiver swelled into family pride when it turned out that the unknown author was Darwin’s own nephew on the Shrewsbury side, Henry Parker, Marianne’s eldest boy, who had left Oxford University and was trying to establish himself in London as a literary man. What an “odd chance,” Darwin exclaimed. His life was visibly changing when the younger generation of the family started rising in his support.

  All in all, he suspected he might have wasted his time on orchids. “It has not been worth, I fear, the 10 months it has cost me: it was a hobby horse & so beguiled me.”84

  chapter

  6

  BATTLE OF THE BOOKS

  NE MORNING early in 1862, Alfred Russel Wallace stepped off the train from Dover. His cheeks had sunk, his skin was sallow. His beard could not disguise the fact that his travels in Malaysia had turned him into a wraith. He said afterwards that the effort of bringing all his crates together in London was immense. He specially regretted saying goodbye to the two living birds of paradise that he had brought home. During the voyage he had fed them cockroaches brushed from the ship’s biscuits, worried about frosty nights in Egypt, and stayed an extra week or two in Malta so that they could adjust to lowered temperatures. His first task on reaching London was to transfer these “wonderful birds” into the hands of Mr. Bartlett, the senior keeper at the Zoological Gardens. “Attracting much notice,” they were the first birds of paradise to be exhibited in Britain, said the Saturday Review, and were placed in an indoor cage until a new aviary was ready in the gardens. “Thus ended my Malayan travels,” Wallace wistfully recorded.1

&n
bsp; To return to Europe was for him something of a mixed blessing. He had a lot of catching up to do, not just with the progress of natural selection and the rise of Darwin’s Origin of Species but also with his professional and private life. All those years of hardship had taken their toll. London came as a physical shock to his system, so drab after the high colours of the East. He had forgotten how grimy the buildings were, how frantic the pace of nineteenth-century life, and he felt oddly disoriented by the horses and carriages rattling past. Damp air seeped into his bones. “I went to live with my brother-in-law Mr. Thomas Sims, and my sister Mrs. Sims, who had a photographic business in Westbourne Grove. Here, in a large empty room at the top of the house, I brought together all the collections which I had reserved for myself and which my agent Mr. Stevens had taken care of for me. I found myself surrounded by a quantity of packing-cases and store-boxes, the contents of many of which I had not seen for five or six years, and to the examination and study of which I looked forward with intense excitement.”2

  For four months he did little except sit in his sister’s house and acclimatise. At the same time, he may have mourned a little over ending his travels. But at the first opportunity he got in touch with Darwin, sending along a wild honeycomb from Timor, hoping it “will be interesting to you.” It was—and a little later on Wallace forwarded specimens of the bees that made it.

  Both men seemed keen to delay a personal meeting. Perhaps too much had happened since their unexpected literary union. Instead, they corresponded in a courteous fashion about the reviews and criticisms of their theory, relaxed enough with each other by mail. It could have been worse. Starved of intellectual contact while he had been away, Wallace longed to discuss the leading elements of his theory with the only other man who truly understood it. He was unfamiliar with the third edition of the Origin of Species (the copy Darwin sent must be in Singapore, he said apologetically), but wasted little time in telling Darwin that he felt it was a bad idea to list all the difficulties quite so prominently. “You have assisted those who want to criticise you by overstating the difficulties & objections—several of them quote your own words as the strongest arguments against you,” he said.3 He unpacked his copy of the first edition from his luggage and started to pick through the points where they agreed or differed.4