by Janet Browne
As it stood, Bates’s volume represented one of the subtlest strikes on behalf of Darwinism. Unlike Huxley or Lyell in either tone or content, Bates addressed a different facet of the Victorian mind, one that thirsted for adventure stories and heroic accounts of geographical exploration far beyond Britain’s horizons. Bates’s account interlaced jungle tales and exotic natural history with descriptions of indigenous Amazonian culture and its Portuguese overlays. One haunting image was of its author, miles from European contact, despondently reading and rereading the advertisements in an old copy of the Athenaeum for company. His empathy and interest in the areas and peoples where he lived and worked were evident.
As far as Darwin was concerned, the important material came towards the end. There Bates gave an eyewitness account of the origin of species in nature. Two Amazonian butterflies, the black-and-crimson-spotted Heliconius melpomene and the Heliconius thelixope, if taken separately, were perfectly distinct species. Bates discovered four or five transitional forms living in particular geographical areas in between the two, each connected by a chain of gradations. The intermediate forms were not hybrids. They were geographical races, each on their way to becoming separate species. “We seem to obtain here a glimpse of the manufacture of new species in nature.”72
“It is a grand book and whether or not it sells quickly it will last,” Darwin congratulated him. “You have spoken out boldly on species; and boldness on the subject seems to get rarer and rarer.”73 His nemesis, the Athenaeum, coolly reported that Bates twisted the facts to support Darwin.
Yet butterflies were destined to become evolution’s most elegant practical support. During the next few years, Wallace produced his own analysis of insect mimicry as a form of protective colouration, revealing his belief in the efficacy of natural selection and adding the idea that a single species may mimic several different models. To unpick the various configurations of Malaysian Papilionidae as Wallace did required astonishing mastery of detail. Nevertheless, this form of imitation came to be known as Batesian mimicry, and its study was carried forward by Roland Trimen, based in South Africa, another of Darwin’s correspondents. Later, the naturalist Fritz Müller, who had the advantage of living in Brazil, began his own long-term investigation into another kind of mimicry, in which the insects converge in looks. Usually known as Müllerian mimicry, this additional demonstration of natural selection was published in 1878. Many of the strongest believers in Darwinism in the 1860s and 1870s turned out to be those who studied species in their natural habitat, the field naturalists like Bates and Trimen, and men with extensive field experience such as Hooker and Wallace.
IX
What with butterflies, fossil mankind, and apes, Darwin had more than enough to occupy his mind. But his attention continued to linger lovingly on plants. “Are there any Lythraceae in Ceylon?” he asked George Thwaites, the superintendent of Peradeniya Gardens in Sri Lanka. “What I am anxious to know is, whether you find it necessary to grow the different varieties [of Hollyhock] far apart from each other?” he inquired of Charles Turner, a nurseryman at Slough. “The case of the yellow plum is a treasure,” he told Thomas Rivers, another nurseryman in Hertfordshire. “I do want very much to know, whether you have sown any seed of any Moss-Roses, & whether the seedlings were Moss-Roses.—Has a common rose produced by seed a moss-rose?” All through the spring and early summer of 1863 he moved purposefully from the kitchen garden to his hothouse to his study, backing up these written inquiries with careful observations of his own.
Yet his health was deteriorating. “I am unwell & must write briefly,” he told John Scott, giving up an interesting discussion on the fertilisation of Lobelia. He told Hooker and Huxley that the “smallest exertion” now seemed to lead to vomiting, irrespective of whether he attempted a pleasure trip to see friends, made a visit to London to deliver a scientific paper, or stayed safely at home in the bosom of his family. The bustle of Victorian travel, far from providing the invigorating lift to his spirits that used to be the case, merely exhausted him. At times, even reading “makes my head whiz.”
This had been going on for some time. When three old comrades from the Beagle had arrived at Down House for a weekend visit in October 1862, and Darwin enjoyed a gossipy evening of reminiscences with them, he had felt too ill in the morning to get up to say farewell. He confided to Wallace that such sickness made it impossible to see friends. “I have always suffered from the excitement of talking, but now it has become ludicrous,” he said to Hooker. “I talked lately ½ hours (broken by tea by myself) with my nephew, and I was ill half the night. It is a fearful evil for self and family.” Even an affable half an hour with Lyell, his oldest and most congenial companion, could lead to retching. While it is easy enough to see that Darwin may have sometimes used these illnesses as a way of restricting unwanted social commitments, and that his attacks might mirror the ebb and flow of underlying mental tensions, the practical effects could not be ignored. Leonard Darwin—then aged eleven or twelve—recalled the uneasy air at home.
As a young lad I went up to my father when strolling about the lawn, and he, after, as I believe a kindly word or two, turned away as if quite incapable of carrying on any conversation. Then there suddenly shot through my mind the conviction that he wished he were no longer alive. Must there not have been a strained and weary expression in his face to have produced in these circumstances such an effect on a boy’s mind?74
In the summer of 1862 his vomiting alternated with bouts of eczema. He got in touch with James Startin, a London expert known for his specialised prescriptions for skin disorders, and liberally applied the expensive “muddy stuff” he acquired to his arms and hands with a camel-hair brush. This apparently did some good, because he sent the prescription on to Hooker. The same tendency to eczema returned in the summer of 1863.
This time, he sought out William Jenner, a physician recently appointed to Queen Victoria’s household. Despite the passing authority of his royal connections, Jenner was unable to stop him vomiting. Putting his faith in home remedies, Darwin then kept himself going with doses of Condy’s Ozonised Fluid, a Victorian pick-me-up previously recommended for Leonard’s scarlet fever. When it ran out, Horace manufactured soda water for him “in our fizzing machine.”75 Pedantically, he began querying every piece of medical advice that arrived in the post. When Jenner prescribed podophyllum (a drastic purgative), he asked Erasmus whether the dosage was completely safe. Then, when Jenner substituted “enormous quantities of chalk, magnesia & carb. of ammonia,” Darwin discussed these at length with Fox. In March 1863 he declared he was worsening. The bouts of vomiting extended from four, to six, to twelve days in a row.
Bypassing Jenner temporarily, and with Hooker’s and Huxley’s approval, he consulted George Busk, already known to him as a natural history author and practising medical man with wide hospital experience. Busk suggested that Darwin might have “waterbrash,” a diseased watery secretion of the stomach, for which he enclosed a prescription. Armed with this interesting new thought, Darwin grasped at the high technology of nineteenth-century biological science and sent some vomit on a glass microscope slide to John Goodsir, an acquaintance specialising in microscopical investigations, asking Goodsir to search for pathogenic vegetable spores. He was disappointed to hear that his stomach fluids were just as they should be.76
In the end, bad health forced him back to the water-cure. In September 1863 he went to Malvern, at Emma’s request, where he spent some weeks as an out-patient, living with his wife and children in a rented villa in the town, as they had done during his first visit in 1849. Horace was still a frail child and Darwin and Emma wanted him to try the therapy as well. “Our youngest boy is a regular invalid with severe indigestion, clearly inherited from me.”77
Agreeing to visit Malvern was a measure of how ill Darwin felt. Ever since the “odious” time he had had at Ilkley, he had regarded any extended residential treatment at a water-cure as something to be avoided at all costs. His cont
act with Edward Lane had been lost—Lane had sold Sudbrooke Park and moved out of the water business for a while.78 Glumly, Darwin considered Malvern more as a punishment than a promised cure. Furthermore, he felt an inherent dislike for returning to Malvern itself. Painful memories rose of the days in 1851 when his daughter Annie died during Dr. Gully’s treatment. He and Emma steeled themselves for an unpleasant time.
They stopped at Erasmus’s house on the way. “He went to bed on his arrival,” reported Erasmus in concern. “In the morning [he] came down at once to the carriage where we made up a kind of bed as he cannot sit up from giddiness.”79 He was evidently iller than he had been for a long time.
The Malvern cure failed dismally. He had lost his enthusiasm for energetic therapies—the steaming, slapping, rubbing, and wrapping—preferring the more leisurely routines of recent years. Darwin’s customary doctor, James Manby Gully, was unwell (a mental breakdown, hinted Fox) and unable to treat him personally.80 Emma arranged for another physician, James Ayerst, to supervise Darwin, but the prospective patient did not take the change gladly. He felt sure he was being fobbed off with second-best. So Emma persuaded Gully to come over to see Darwin in order to endorse Ayerst’s regime. By then Darwin’s eczema was too raw and inflamed to bear any water.
In fact, Darwin seems to have had a breakdown. As soon as he arrived at Malvern he suffered a complete collapse. In the space of a few days he became so weak he could scarcely walk in the garden of their villa. At one point, he said, he kept himself alive with doses of brandy. Afterwards, when Francis Darwin was preparing Darwin’s letters for publication, Henrietta singled out this Malvern misery as an unforgettable time.
Two low-water years were 49 & 63.… In the summer of 63 he had loss of memory (Mother says I am wrong as to this) & Mother told me, so as to be prepared, that an epileptic fit was to be feared. But Mother wd. not like either of these said in the book.81
In the end Darwin was not strong enough to take any further treatment and the visit terminated in disarray. He believed he left Malvern worse than when he arrived. This time, the water-cure “actually harmed” him.
It was an arduous time in other ways that were probably related. Darwin wrote to Fox in alarm about his daughter Annie’s grave.
Emma went yesterday to the church-yard & found the gravestone of our poor child Anne gone. The Sexton declared he remembered it, & searched well for it & came to the conclusion that it has disappeared. He says the churchyard, few years ago, was much altered & we suppose that the stone was then stolen. Now some years ago, you with your usual kindness visited the grave & sent us an account. Can you tell what year this was? I was so ill at the time & Emma hourly expecting her confinement that I went home & did not see the grave. It is not likely, but will you tell us what you can remember about the kind of stone & where it stood; I think you said there was a little tree planted. We want, of course, to put another stone. I know your great & true kindness will forgive this trouble.82
Then Emma found the grave, complete with stone but overgrown and without the balustrade that Darwin thought he remembered once ordering. “A dear and good child,” the memorial read—as true to them that day as it had always been. Had she lived, Anne would have been twenty-two years old. Poignantly, Darwin searched his heart and realised the bitterness was gone.
For a moment, at least. While the Darwins were at Malvern, Hooker wrote to tell them that his six-year-old daughter had died. He poured out his distress to Darwin. She was “my very own, the flower of my flock.… it will be long before I cease to hear her voice in my ears—or feel her little hand stealing into mine, by the fireside & in the Garden—wherever I go she is there.” He knew he would be treated with sympathy by Darwin, who had suffered the same desolation.
I think of you more in my grief than any other friend. Some obstruction of the bowels carried her off after a few hours alarming illness—with all the symptoms of a strangulated hernia.83
Each man needed the other to share compassion and fortitude. Religious consolation was impossible for both of them. Only time softened the pain, Darwin told him. “Trust to me that time will do wonders,” he soothed, “and without causing forgetfulness of your darling.”84
chapter
7
INVALID
HE PERIOD of ill health that followed this trip to Malvern was the worst Darwin ever experienced. In a practical sense, it permanently altered his private life. Afterwards, he felt like an old man, although still only in his fifties. His habits became those of an invalid. His perspectives changed, his ambitions waned. He started to look more like an old man—his hair greyed, his face yellowed, his shoulders began to slump. The neat little beard he had begun so proudly in the summer of 1862 grew bushy and unkempt. For three or four years he withdrew from all society, preferring to give the small energies he could muster to his biological work rather than to what he regarded as pointless small talk or society engagements, a preference that may well have been heroic in its dedication to science but was also a welcome convenience that gave him the privacy he desired. Even though Emma remembered him during this cycle of ill health as being “cheerful & affectionate” in the face of his “sufferings,” it is likely that he became increasingly querulous. His work tailed off. Understandably, his spirits drooped. “Depressed,” he said at one point.
The tyranny of illness became pronounced. He had to adjust. The family had to adjust. His friends had to adjust. One by one, scientific colleagues, publishers, correspondents, and informants all adjusted. If Darwin had deliberately sought to establish iron control over his personal world, he could scarcely have hit upon a more effective device. Illness changed them all, most of all himself.
For one thing, the physical nature of his sickness could not be ignored. On occasion Darwin was confined to bed for two or three weeks, prostrated with retching, colic, giddiness, and fatigue, sometimes barely able to walk. Emma recorded the wreckage in her diary. During the opening weeks of 1864, a month or two after their return from Malvern, her husband was too weak to get out of bed, vomiting into a chamber-pot four or five times a day.1 “For 25 years,” he wrote in 1865, “extreme spasmodic daily & nightly flatulence; occasional vomiting, on two occasions prolonged during months.… All fatigue, especially rocking, brings on the head symptoms … cannot walk above ½ mile—always tired—conversation or excitement tires me most.”2 At these times he gave up all pretence of leading a normal existence.
For another, Darwin fought back with compulsive determination—a determination that was perhaps part of the problem. He turned his eyes inwards, attempting to establish some form of supremacy over his ailing body, forcing himself to obey a rigid self-imposed discipline, willing his mind to focus on his work, not letting ill health get too much the upper hand, all in an effort to subdue the elemental forces that illness thrust into the daily context. He had a “horror of losing time,” said his son Francis, an observation that was reflected in Darwin’s involuntary desire to record in his diary every day lost through sickness. Sometimes the self-scrutiny became actively interventionist. He would apply to his forehead a stinging substance from a small bottle kept for the purpose that he claimed was useful for restoring his concentration. In the process, he probably succeeded only in making his illnesses the centre of attention. To relinquish self-discipline was, for him, to admit defeat.
The effort nearly broke him. When he reemerged, he had become the figure that most people subsequently remembered—the frail, grey-bearded invalid of Downe.
II
At such a distance it is surely impossible to pinpoint the exact grounds of Darwin’s medical condition. His physical and mental states probably combined so completely with his familial and intellectual setting and with the consequences of his being the author of the Origin of Species that there must be room for doubt whatever is suggested. The multiplicity of his symptoms makes it unlikely that he suffered from a single disease or condition. Nor were the ailments he displayed early in life necessarily p
art of the same problems experienced later on.3 His personality, and his current preoccupations, probably contributed in a decided manner.
However, there can be no doubting the troubles he endured. He described these over and over again in letters to friends and relatives, and they were corroborated by family members and his doctors. His symptoms were largely gastro-intestinal, at times severe, sometimes only chronic, often accompanied by exhaustion, skin disorders, and dizziness. It seems possible that there may have been some digestive malfunction at the root of his problems, perhaps (in modern terms) an ulcerated gut, duodenitis, diverticulitis, or gall-bladder problems. It is unlikely from the existing archival records that he had a blood or immunological disorder, or any latent tropical infection picked up during the Beagle voyage such as Chagas’ disease.4 Nausea, wind, and colic were his constant accompaniments. “I feel nearly sure that the air is generated somewhere lower down than stomach,” he told one doctor, “and as soon as it regurgitates into the stomach the discomfort comes on.”5 Whatever else might have been the result of an over-active imagination, these colicky pains were horribly real. “When the worst attacks were on he seemed almost crushed with agony,” wrote Edward Lane, his water-cure doctor. “Of course such attacks as I have spoken of were only occasional—for no constitution could have borne up long under them in their acute phase—but he was never to the last wholly well—never robust.”6