by Janet Browne
Unsuspecting Wedgwood nieces were roped in during family parties. After one visit to Downe, Sophy, Lucy, and Margaret Wedgwood (Caroline and Jos’s daughters), wrote to tell him that they had collected 256 “specimens of Lythrum” in meadows around Llandudno as instructed and sorted them into the three kinds.30 “We find it rather difficult in gathering to know what are distinct plants and what only offsets.” Darwin had the grace to reply, “My dear angels!… I never dreamed of your taking so much trouble.” In the end, fuelled with information from family and friends, Darwin sent another long paper to the Linnean Society in 1864.
Hooker, Gray, and Oliver were essential soul-mates in this. Late in 1862, Darwin was, however, delighted to locate another botanist cut from the same agreeable experimental cloth. John Scott was a curator at the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh and much interested in hybridisation and experimental horticulture. Darwin reeled him in quickly. “They give or lend me all plants at Kew; but they are very weak in primulas,” he sighed persuasively. “I am sick of ordering plants at London nurseries; I so often get the wrong thing.”31 Flattered, and then intrigued, Scott gave freely of his knowledge. Darwin became fond of him over the years and eventually did much to advance his career.
IV
Best of all, at the end of 1862, he decided to build a hothouse. He was finding it a longish walk over to George Turnbull’s gardens, where the invaluable Horwood patrolled the glasshouses, and he probably sensed that his welcome might be wearing thin.
“Now I am going to tell you a most important piece of news!!” he exclaimed to Hooker in December.
I have almost resolved to build a small hot-house: my neighbours really first-rate gardener has suggested it & offered to make me plans & see that it is well done, & he is a really a clever fellow, who wins lots of prizes & is very observant. He believes that we shd succeed with a little patience; it will be grand amusement for me to experiment with plants.32
True to form, he balked at the expected cost. He consulted neighbours like Turnbull and Norman, wrote to Hooker about industrial-capacity stoves and to Fox about complicated mechanical ventilation devices with handles that screwed open and shut, generally busying himself with the question. At Down House he already possessed an unheated glasshouse, a brick-based, south-facing lean-to against the orchard wall. What he did that winter was to build the first of several heated extensions. He commissioned Horwood to draw up plans, and during January and February 1863 he watched proprietorially as the building emerged under the hands of the village carpenter. Later, in the 1870s, he added another two bays (perhaps three) and ran hot-water pipework through these and the original unheated house, so that he had a range of houses at different temperatures.
The hothouse was completed in February 1863. Darwin asked Hooker if he might have some plants from Kew—“I long to stock it, just like a school-boy.” He was itching to get on. “Would it do to send my box-cart early in the morning, on a day that was not frosty, lining the cart with mats and arriving here before night.… there would be about five hours (with wait) on the journey home.” Hooker hardly had time to nod in agreement before Parslow was at Kew’s front gate with an open-topped cart. When 160 different plants arrived at Down, Darwin felt a trifle ashamed of himself. He made an apologetic remark about depleting the national collections.
Unpacking Hooker’s government-issue flowerpots, “gloating” with Henrietta, and contemplating future experiments as he disentangled each plant from its coconut matting was exactly what suited him best. “I have begun dull steady work on ‘Variation under Domestication,’ ” he said to Gray. “But alas & alas pottering over plants is much better sport.”33
At a stroke Darwin’s routine was transformed. Every morning and afternoon he now spent an hour or so in the new hothouse before walking round the Sandwalk. There was always something to see to, something to fire his imagination, something to plan. There he found warmth, plants, and peace. These three gods provided solace as his health deteriorated and his attention wandered from the lengthy Variation manuscript. In this regard, it was a great advantage to be a gentleman-amateur. Darwin was not bound by any intellectual constraints. He had no teaching or lecturing commitments like Huxley, no professional occupation to fulfill like Hooker, no administrative tasks like Gray. He could afford to follow his passion as it directed him.
V
Here and there, a flash of temper showed. Darwin responded rudely to a gardener writing in the Journal of Horticulture early in 1863. The gardener, Donald Beaton, remarked that no plant-breeder of any reputation in England would wish to have his name associated with Karl Gärtner, because, Beaton claimed, most of Gärtner’s statements about plant breeding were unsupported by the evidence. Startled, Darwin took the remark as a direct hit at himself. He knew Beaton a little bit, and had corresponded with him about Gärtner’s findings: if Gärtner was wrong, so was Darwin. Darwin printed a sharp rejoinder in the same journal, using all his authority as an elite scientist to stun Beaton into silence. He may have done more than he intended, for Beaton died of apoplectic seizure in the autumn.34
He scarcely cooled off before the Athenaeum published an article on spontaneous generation. Inexplicably, Darwin exploded. This time, an anonymous reviewer of William Carpenter’s latest book contemptuously dismissed Darwin and Carpenter as master and disciple. The reviewer made caustic remarks about An Introduction to the Study of Foraminifera (Carpenter’s book on an order of marine organism) and then suggested that the forces of life must lie in primeval ooze, not in Darwin’s “breath of a Creator.” The author made it clear that he favoured Pouchet’s chemical origin of living organisms, “heterogeny” in the terminology of the day.
Carpenter replied to the Athenaeum denying any intellectual debt to Darwin and going so far the other way as almost to claim that his studies of Foraminifera justified an anti-Darwinian inference. He disassociated himself completely from godless ooze. Darwin was surprised, for he counted Carpenter as a friend and a partial convert to evolutionary theory. Losing all sense of proportion, he hit back in April in an article also published in the Athenaeum. “A mass of mud with matter decaying and undergoing complex chemical changes is a fine hiding-place for obscurity of ideas,” he fulminated against the reviewer.
Is there a fact, or a shadow of a fact, supporting the belief that these elements, without the presence of any organic compounds, and acted on only by known forces, could produce a living creature?35
He went on to defend the way his theory connected “by an intelligible thread of reasoning a multitude of facts.” Then he “exhaled” crossly in a letter to Hooker.
It will be some time before we see “slime, snot or protoplasm” (what an elegant writer) generating a new animal. But I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion & used Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant “appeared” by some wholly unknown process.—It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, of origin of life; one might as well think of origin of matter.36
Usually the soul of patience, Hooker scolded Darwin for interfering in matters that should be left alone.
I cannot abide this lugging of Science before the public in Times & Athenaeum, & implore you my dear fellow not do so again.… The only party that gains by these discussions is the proprietor of the paper, the only one that loses every way, is the maintainer of truth. Science will be much more perfected if it keeps its discussions within its own niche.
Darwin hardly needed to be told this, but he sent a second letter to the Athenaeum anyway. His temper was not improved to hear that Richard Owen was the anonymous reviewer. Eventually he calmed down and apologised to Hooker. “You give good advice about not writing in newspapers; I have been gnashing my teeth at my own folly.… if I am ever such a fool again have no mercy on me.”37 He told Lyell the same: “I was an ass to write to Athenaeum.”
Nevertheless, soon afterwards, he nearly argued with Asa Gray over politics. While the Civil War tore America apart, Darwin’s feelings ran high,
far higher than commonly thought. North against South, Unionist against Confederate, the shock waves reverberated across the globe. From the first talk of Confederate secession until the surrender of the southern states at Appomattox Courthouse, he was intently engaged: “I never knew the newspapers so profoundly interesting.” Every day he would turn first to the reports in the Times by William Howard Russell, the special war correspondent who for Britons was the voice of America in the public prints. Darwin passionately wanted the southern states to abandon slavery. He told Gray that he despaired at President Lincoln’s initial sidestepping of the slavery issue in order to defend the Union. On the other side of the ocean, Gray ardently supported his president. “The first gun raised my spirits, and they have never flagged since,” he declared, letting his Yankee sentiments spill into the open. For him, the Union, not slavery, was the primary issue.
All Darwin’s abolitionist fury burst out. “I have not seen or heard of a soul who is not with the North,” he wrote emotionally.
Some few, & I am one, even wish to God, though at the loss of millions of lives, that the North would proclaim a crusade against Slavery. In the long run, a million horrid deaths would be amply repaid in the cause of humanity.… Great God how I shd like to see that greatest curse on Earth Slavery abolished.38
To be sure, Darwin simplified the issues. Although he supported the anti-slavery cause more completely than any other social principle in his life, it was nevertheless relatively easy for him, quietly situated in an English village and buttressed by a private income, to advocate a moral crusade in America. Conveniently, he forgot the colonial and industrial sources of British economic wealth, forgot that his own stocks and shares rested on the manual labour of railway navvies, miners, indentured millhands, and plantation coolies. Full of humanitarian fervour, he ignored the complex political and personal turmoil through which men like Gray were living. Of course, Gray abhorred the system of slavery. But he found it annoying that his English friend took the virtuous high ground without an apparent thought for the terrible, pragmatic realities of maintaining the Union.
On the other hand, the Trent affair of 1861 brought out Darwin’s patriotic instincts. Like most Britons, he found it outrageous that a Union ship should intercept and board an English mail boat, even if it carried two Confederate envoys, and said so to Gray. Gray threw Darwin’s scientific theories back at him: “We must be strong to be secure and respected—natural selection quickly crushes out weak nations.” Gray accused English politicians of being swayed by the mob.
“Hitherto I have been able to write with some sympathy,” muttered Darwin to Hooker. “Now I must be silent; for I look at the people as a nation of unmitigated blackguards.” The two Englishmen agreed that Gray was “blind to everything & what is worse brags like the greatest bullies amongst them.”39 For a while they exchanged Gray’s letters, “as political and nearly as mad as ever,” remarked Darwin as he sent one along to Hooker in November 1862. Unmoved, Gray lectured them both from across the Atlantic about the North’s ability to persevere alone, and issued testy reminders that articles in the Times did not carry as much significance in the United States as Darwin evidently thought. “Homely, honest, ungainly Lincoln is the representative man of the country,” Gray insisted.40 Meanwhile, the textile manufacturing regions of Britain encountered economic distress as supplies of raw cotton from the American South dried up. Despite his dislike of the Confederacy, Darwin fired off a donation of ten guineas to the Lancashire Cotton Spinners’ relief fund, far more than he usually gave to charity.41
The near collapse of Union forces defending Washington in the battle of Bull Run stirred him more than expected.
I have managed to skim the newspaper, but had not heart to read all the bloody details. Good God what will the end be; perhaps we are too despondent here; but I must think you are too hopeful on your side of the water. I never believed the “canard” of the army of the Potomac having capitulated. My good dear wife & self are come to wish for peace at any price.42
It was a tense time, although the two never broke off relations. “We must keep to science, I fear, for we both seem to be getting to think each other’s country’s conduct worse & worse,” Darwin said in April 1863.43 As the Times switched sides and Russell was expelled from American soil, Darwin commiserated with Gray, calling the newspaper the “Bloody old Times,” as William Cobbett used to do.44 When the war ended, he reflected sorrowfully on their mutual troubles.
I congratulate you, & I can do this honestly, as my reason has always urged & ordered me to be a hearty good wisher for the north, though I could not do so enthusiastically, as I felt we were so hated by you.… I declare I can hardly yet realise the grand, magnificent fact that Slavery is at an end in your country.45
Not far below the surface of this correspondence lay anxious thoughts about Louis Agassiz. Both before and during the Civil War period, Agassiz’s definition of species gave scientific credence to the idea of marked human racial differences. His followers, and on several occasions Agassiz himself, claimed Negroes were a separate species from Caucasians, a point of view that had immediate implications for the anti-slavery movement. For a long time now, Agassiz had been convinced that human beings were divided by God into a number of species from the beginning—a logical corollary to his belief in the separate created identity of every living form. Negroes, he proposed, were physiologically and anatomically distinct from whites, created by God to be fixed in their separateness.
So saying, Agassiz joined the controversy over the unity or plurality of the human race, a controversy that had begun decades before Darwin’s writings and had spread widely across contemporary culture during the 1830s and 1840s, especially in America when given scientific and anthropological significance by Samuel George Morton’s study of skulls and Josiah Clark Nott and George Robbins Gliddon’s notorious Types of Mankind (1854), which provided a series of apparent biological justifications for black inferiority. Racial biology, politics, and the origin of species combined in ugly fashion during the war crisis, principally because Agassiz’s writings lent scientific authority to southerners determined to defend the slave system. Agassiz became dogmatic in his opposition to transmutation, increasingly vehement in his racial, creationist biology. Here was a celebrated man at the head of his adopted nation’s intellectual life, a fine naturalist and lover of nature, a staunch supporter of the Union—Agassiz was altogether a puzzle to his colleagues. His students felt the tension. From 1863 or so, some of them began drifting away from Agassiz’s museum at Harvard, either attracted by Darwin’s alternative universe or developing their own form of non-Darwinian evolution.46
Opponents like Gray or Lyell were frankly repelled by his public pronouncements. Gray, whose dislike for Agassiz was now intense, vented his feelings to Hooker.
This man, who might have been so useful to science and promised so much here has been for years a delusion, a snare, and a humbug, and is doing us far more harm than he can ever do us good.47
VI
In 1863, three significant books written by Darwin’s closest supporters sprang from the English presses, each author defending and extending evolution in his own way. These books presented indisputable evidence that natural selection was not a mere flash in the pan. The scope and logic of natural selection was made apparent to contemporaries even if not acceptable to some of them. And as a mode of formal communication the books had a material impact. While newspapers, journals, and reviews were important to Darwin in their day, books were better suited to discuss the multiple issues that were now emerging. The friendly support that Darwin first received from his circles of acquaintance in reviews was, in effect, transformed into a genuinely public space in which other authors and other audiences began to participate in debate and negotiation. These books moved a long way beyond Darwin’s original thesis. Contentious and resilient, “Darwinism” began developing as a body of thought.48
Lyell headed the charge. By now he was more than read
y to make public the accumulated results of his investigations into the early history of mankind. He still believed there was a spiritual side to humanity that defied rational explanation. But he had reached such an advanced stage in his researches that he had to publish, come what may. His letters to Darwin were as warm as ever. A sociable man, he would have liked to see more of his old friend on the scientific circuit. He reminisced sentimentally about their long friendship and promised Darwin that his new book would support evolution. In return, Darwin admired Lyell’s courage—he recognised that what had been relatively easy for him to accept was a wrench for the older man. “Considering his age, his former views, and position in society, I think his conduct has been heroic on this subject.”49
Lyell’s title was blunt: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation. It was published by Murray in the first week of February 1863, sold out immediately, was reprinted three times in 1863, and was very widely reviewed. The firm of G. W. Childs in Philadelphia brought out an American edition, and by 1864 the book was available in German, French, and Dutch. “I am reading your book on the Antiquity of Man,” wrote William Whewell to Lyell in February, “as all the world has done or is doing.” Mudie’s Circulating Library bought several thousand to distribute to an audience impatient for all things evolutionary.
In this book Lyell pulled back the curtain on civilisation to reveal the world of human geological history. Until then, the paucity of human fossil remains had suggested that mankind was fairly recent in geological terms, a view that accorded well with the idea that humanity appeared only when the earth reached its modern state after the glacial period, or—for those who believed in the biblical flood—at the point when the waters receded. Lyell pushed the origin of human beings much further back than this watery dividing line, into the geological deep past. His writing, as always, was vivid. His description of Philippe-Charles Schmerling’s descent by rope into Belgian underground galleries and cave chambers in search of ancestral bones made readers sit up and take notice. Furthermore, his use of the expression “missing links” in the fossil record lodged permanently in the public mind.50