Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  “He does not feel the least temptation to disobey orders about working for he feels quite incapable of doing any thing,” she told Fox firmly.21 “One day is a little better & one a little worse,” she wrote to Hooker, “but I cannot say that he makes progress at present. He stays in his bed room & gets frequently in & out of bed & occasionally goes down stairs for a very short time, but he can only stand very short visits even of the boys.”22 Horace Darwin relinquished the old Beagle telescope so that his father could scan the garden from an upstairs window for any natural history activity. Horace and Leonard obligingly brought him news from the hothouse.

  Most of all, Darwin disliked having his letters and his work taken away from him. Without this, he had “nothing” to make his life worth living. So he pleaded with Emma to be allowed to read a little scientific paper here and there, or to make a few notes for some project of his own. He did complete the last pages of the paper he had been composing on the triple fertilisation of Lythrum and sent it off to Hooker and the Linnean Society. But Emma would not let him read John Scott’s manuscript on experimental plant fertilisation when it arrived in the post. It looked dauntingly technical.

  Instead, Emma and Henrietta served as his amanuenses. Many of Darwin’s letters during these months are in his ladies’ handwriting—large, round, and easily readable. Both women learned to forge his signature. One letter to Daniel Oliver, which was written and signed by Emma, carried at the bottom a note in Darwin’s own writing, “Excuse brevity & forgery as I am unwell in bed.” A letter to his son William in 1866 similarly ended with Henrietta signing Darwin’s signature to which Darwin added the mocking, self-explanatory words, “(miserable forgery).”23 Several of the fake signatures on other letters carried supplementary remarks from Darwin—“a forgery” or “base forgery.” When his women got bored, he would call on any available youngster. He did not hesitate to summon a nephew from a flock of Wedgwoods playing croquet one afternoon in 1866. “Godfrey has been very nice & Papa feels him so tame as to get him to write for him,” said Emma.

  The pace of his life slowed to that of a plant. “A few words about the stove-plants,” he wrote to Hooker. “They do so amuse me. I have crawled to see them two or three times.” Occasionally he tinkered with the insect-eating plants that Hooker sent to tempt his intellectual appetite, and Leonard remembered trotting off down the garden to fetch one of these specimens up to the study because—as his father said—he was so “infernally healthy.” Confined to his room by sickness on many occasions, he mostly watched twining plants that were brought indoors to stand on a warm windowsill. He noticed how the tendrils slowly swept in a circle until they met a suitable object to twist around. The tendrils were “just like fingers.”

  John Horwood, the gardener from the Rookery, thought otherwise. “I believe, Sir, the tendrils can see, for wherever I put a plant it finds out any stick near enough,” he said.24 Thereafter, Darwin observed twining plants with rising curiosity. Once he struggled out in a storm to see how the wild bryony in his garden hedge fared in the wind and found it riding the gale like a ship with two anchors down, straining at the end of its lines like the Beagle. Otherwise, watching the movements of leaves matched his invalid habits admirably. For two summers he observed the tendrils of pea plants circle about in search of something to fasten onto, a serene activity just right for an ailing naturalist with plenty of time on his hands. Botany was a solace to him: “It is all that I am good for; I can just do an hour or two’s work, when I can do nothing else,” he told Innes.25 Bit by bit he built up a file of observations on climbing plants that he published in 1865 in the Linnean Society Journal.

  Emma encouraged William to take part in Darwin’s botanical work and keep the necessary momentum going. “Your father wishes the following observation to be made to you, viz. that Meneanthes is now in flower & to be left to your comprehension,” she wrote in May 1864.26 But Darwin missed his exchanges with Hooker. Emma participated by proxy.

  Dear Dr Hooker,

  I cannot give a very good account of Charles. He has frequent attacks of sickness but recovers from them in a wonderful manner & they are often with very little distress. The stomach retains the food in a surprizing manner which accounts for his not getting thin. His medical men speak confidently of his regaining his former state of health. He desires me to say that your letters always give him the greatest pleasure tho’ he grudges you the time you employ in them. The partridge’s foot has now produced 54 plants which he hopes may stick in your throat.27

  Almost as bad, in the short term, he was obliged to give up his account books, the other defining aspect of his private life. Darwin did not have sufficent spirit to maintain the double-entry bookkeeping his father had taught him. So Emma cast the family accounts while he attempted to explain to her how to enter his stock market transactions, trust fund records, and mortgage interest receipts. She was accustomed to do her own accounts for household expenditure, listing meat, butter, cheese, candles, clothes, “best tea,” and “servant’s tea,” in a separate book, including a place on each page for “errors,” which once or twice ran to over £7 in a single year.

  But Darwin was alarmed to see the family’s expenditure for 1864, totted up by Emma in August at the end of his financial year. It was way beyond the usual sum. In the end he could bear it no longer and went over the figures himself. “Papa found out the great error in his accounts & also that we are not spending much more, if any more, than for the last few years, all of which cheered him,”28 Emma said, oblivious to the fiscal distress she had caused. There were many mistakes in her arithmetic. Somehow, Darwin never again found his ill health sufficiently debilitating to relinquish his accounts to another’s mathematics.

  Hooker obeyed instructions not to communicate, saying that he felt it a positive privation. “I was very glad to get his letter this morning, but he must not try to write to me,” he told Emma. He knew better than to argue with a wife who had issued sickroom orders. But he was accustomed to hearing from Darwin once or twice or week, in letters crammed with requests for information, descriptions of projects in hand, books and articles to discuss, and scientific gossip, every one the sign of a man in his active intellectual prime. In March 1863, when no letter from Darwin appeared for eight days, he had asked Lyell to inquire whether Darwin was all right. “Hooker not having heard from you, is growing anxious, and hopes it is because you are corresponding with me and not because of serious ill-health,” wrote Lyell obediently.

  Darwin felt the ban equally hard. He loved Hooker as a brother and liked to share his life with him. He sympathised with Hooker’s administrative problems at the Gardens, respected his judgement, read his botanical texts with admiration, marvelled at the variety of his knowledge, laughed at his temper, and nagged him to look after his health. In a way, Hooker almost was a brother, for Darwin had regarded Henslow (Hooker’s father-in-law) as their shared surrogate father. United by affection and regard, the relationship meant a great deal to both of them, and the death of Hooker’s daughter became a deep personal bond. In that respect, Darwin was relieved to hear that the other friends had rallied round to soothe Hooker’s despair over the death. Lubbock whisked Hooker away to search for flints in Abbeville as a scientific distraction. From his sickbed, Darwin insisted on sending word. “My dear old friend,” he scribbled in a wavery hand. “I must just have pleasure of saying this.” Later, they talked about the death more freely. Darwin’s scrap of a letter was a silver lining to his cloud, Hooker said.

  Sometime soon after this, Hooker inquired whether Darwin might sit for a portrait bust by the sculptor Thomas Woolner. A competent water-colour artist himself, Hooker had a good eye for the fine arts, sculpture, and china. He admired Woolner’s work, having previously commissioned from him a bust of his father, William Jackson Hooker, and of John Stevens Henslow. Personally, he collected Wedgwood ware, especially portrait medallions, a hobby-horse that became a joke between him and Darwin. “We are degenerate descendents of
old Josiah W. for we have not a bit of pretty ware in the house,” Darwin teased him. Still, in November 1863 Darwin asked his sister Susan to rummage around in the old house in Shrewsbury. He sent Hooker an original Wedgwood vase given to Robert Waring Darwin by the first Josiah Wedgwood.

  Hooker was uncertain whether Darwin would agree to a sculpture.

  I am very anxious to get Woolner down to take a clay model of your bust for myself, as you kindly promised I might; & I look to Mrs. Darwin to let me know when—he shall cut it in marble at his leisure for me. Such heaps of people want to know what you are like—& the photographs are not pleasing.29

  Darwin replied he was far too ill to contemplate the upheaval that such a commission would entail.30 Nevertheless, he accepted a few years later.

  Other friends were concerned by his lengthy sickness. “Mr Huxley writes to Papa that I am to treat him like Vivien did Merlin & shut him up in an oak,” Emma informed her daughter Henrietta. “He then apologises that Vivien is not a very proper person, but as Papa does not read Tennyson concludes it does not signify.”31 Quite how Huxley meant this remark to be taken remains something of a mystery—it was a strangely inventive friend who could liken Darwin to the proud old magician of The Idylls of the King, seduced by sex and flattery into giving up his secrets. Huxley may have regarded himself as another Vivien, prising truths out of a recalcitrant fount of knowledge, or meant only that Emma should keep her husband secluded in the leafy countryside until he was restored to health.

  Dr. Jenner’s doses of antacids brought relief of a kind. “Hurrah!” the patient shouted in March 1864. “I have been 52 hours without vomiting!!” He wrote to Hooker and Huxley praising Jenner’s ability to get him back on his feet. “I shall certainly vote for him for F.R.S. this year,” quipped Hooker, putting the thought into action later that year.

  The improvement was only temporary. For the next two years Darwin continued much the same, “confined to a living grave,” he told Hooker, living on “endless foolish novels which are read aloud to me by my dear womenkind.”32 He said the same to Gray. “I have heard during late 9 months an astounding number of love scenes.”33 He saw hardly anyone, not even Hooker. In time, he felt well enough to make a few botanical observations, asking for plants to be brought indoors to be placed next to his chair or sofa, or walking down to the hothouse for a hour. “The only approach to work which I can do is to look at tendrils & climbers.… This does not distress my weakened brain.”34

  IV

  In November 1864, Darwin received the Copley Medal, the Royal Society’s highest scientific honour.35

  The internal politics behind these annual awards were formidable, and every year fellows of the Royal Society would throw themselves into fast and furious negotiations for various candidates. They would haggle and bargain for votes, host soirées and dinner parties, lobby and campaign for their man as if electioneering for a parliamentary seat, perhaps more so, for the Copley Medal signalled an individual’s accession to the very pinnacle of British science. Sometimes proposers had to make do with one of the lesser medals for their candidate, prestigious scientific honours in their own right but not quite the same as a Copley. Sometimes they had to admit defeat or wait their turn. Once or twice, a candidate waited rather too long. In 1866, William Henry Harvey died between nomination and voting day. To get Darwin a Copley Medal was a considerable coup for the Darwinian army—an acknowledgement of his intellectual standing and an endorsement of the naturalistic approach to science. It was just the kind of challenge that Hooker and Huxley relished. “Many of us were somewhat doubtful of the result,” said Huxley ominously.

  Nominations had started in 1862 when John Lubbock and William Carpenter put Darwin’s name forward. That was bad timing. The debate over the Origin of Species was at its height, and the Royal Society’s council doubtless felt that Darwin’s proposals were as yet far too controversial to mark with an award. The medal was given to the chemist Thomas Graham. By 1863, Darwin’s friends better understood how to work the system. Carpenter backed the proposal with the passage from John Stuart Mill’s Logic in which Mill praised Darwin. “Dr Carpenter showed me the extract from Mill’s Logic which he read when he argued for your having the Copley Medal,” reflected Erasmus. “Have you seen it?”36 The award went to Adam Sedgwick, a popular choice, although he was nominated by Richard Owen almost certainly to block Huxley and the Darwinites. “The numbers were 8 to 10 for Charles, but the Cambridge men mustered very strongly for Sedgwick,” Erasmus told Emma. Given these circumstances, it seems entirely possible that Huxley’s presence on council, his known support for the Origin of Species, and his continuing disagreement with Owen materially impeded Darwin’s chances. Sedgwick was sufficiently elderly to warrant prompt attention.

  Edward Sabine, the Royal Society’s president, nevertheless saw pressure mounting. That same year he warned John Phillips, the Oxford geologist, that the old guard would not be able to squash Huxley so easily next time.

  With all respect to Darwin’s great services, and recognising that his recent work on Orchids must be classed amongst these, I cannot see without extreme concern the efforts of a very strong party to obtain the award of the Copley Medal to him expressly on the ground of his conclusions as to the “Origin of Species.” … We may not have so good an alternative next year.37

  In 1864, Darwin’s supporters changed tactics. Lubbock, Carpenter, and Huxley were obliged to retire from the council after their fixed term of office, and so George Busk agreed to nominate Darwin, seconded by Hugh Falconer. It looks as if Busk and Falconer deliberately downplayed the Origin of Species in a more cautiously formulated nomination. This time the omens were promising. William Sharpey and Gabriel Stokes were the joint secretaries, both of whom knew Darwin through the Philosophical Club (the Royal Society’s dining club), and the treasurer was William Hallowes Miller, the Cambridge mineralogist who had helped him with Beagle rocks and the mathematics of bees’ cells. While none of these were close friends or supporters, they were fair-minded respectable men. Hooker was on the council, ready to push things along more subtly than Huxley was ever able. Rival nominees were famous but not so famous as to create a major threat: the chemist A. W. Hofmann (who received the Copley in 1875), M.H.V. Regnault (1869), and Hermann Helmholtz (1873).

  Falconer was abroad when the nominations were discussed, so he sent a letter to the Royal Society describing Darwin’s achievements. These he divided into five areas—“geology, physical geography, zoology, physiological botany, and genetic biology.” Though he was by no means a convert to evolutionary theory, he emphasised the importance of Darwin’s Origin of Species, calling it “this great essay.” Falconer’s letter became the basis of the formal statement that Busk put forward.

  Such attention to detail paid off. Hooker told Darwin that the affair was managed so cleverly that two “old fogies” voting in the council chamber even asked politely what had Darwin written. The vote went Darwin’s way—a majority of twelve. Irrepressibly, Huxley took the credit. “The more ferocious sort had begun to whet their beaks and sharpen their claws.” Yet in an odd turn of phrase, the minute book stated that the Origin of Species did not form part of the council’s deliberations. The public benediction that the Darwinians desired was intentionally withheld.

  Scientific politics were at stake here. When he heard the news, Huxley exploded to Hooker. Not only was the omission of the Origin of Species a calculated slight on all those like himself who publicly supported Darwin, he declared, it reeked of scientific censorship. “I felt that this would never do.” At the award ceremony in November he demanded to know why the Origin was excluded. Was the council placing the book on an “index expurgatorius”?38 He called for the minutes of council to be read. Everyone was shocked by the outburst, but there was truth in Huxley’s words. The minutes did imply that the Origin of Species had been deliberately omitted. Later that day, in the speech after dinner usually given by the medallist, Lyell (speaking on Darwin’s behalf)
told the assembled fellows that he supported Huxley’s intervention and considered Darwin’s Origin a lasting achievement.39 Writing to Darwin the next day he confided, “I said I had been forced to give up my old faith without thoroughly seeing my way to a new one. But I think you would have been satisfied with the length I went.”

  All this excitement took place without Darwin’s presence—another of those key occasions on which his friends fought for him in his absence. Saying he was too ill to go, he asked Busk to accept the medal on his behalf. As with the Oxford British Association meeting, his presence would have inhibited everyone’s freedom to fight. Certainly Huxley would not have been so outspoken. “What a pity you can’t be there,” Erasmus wrote, “and yet if you were it could not be done so well.”40 The medal was a fine thing, Erasmus cynically continued. The gold did not amount to a pair of candlesticks.

  Nor could Huxley let it rest there. For weeks afterwards he pestered Stokes to change the wording in the published report. “What I do protest about is that without the knowledge and consent of Darwin’s proposer and seconder, a phrase should have been inserted which compresses the maximum amount of offence into the handiest possible form for Darwin’s opponents.” Stokes defended his minute book. The bulldog bit harder. Finally, Stokes altered the wording in the printed Proceedings. And shortly thereafter, when Huxley published the medal announcement in the Reader, he edited out the offending words. Through force of personality he showed that he could play the same game to greater effect.

  “I hear from Hooker there has been some row about what Sabine exactly said,” inquired Darwin. It was Falconer who relayed the news.

  You will see the President’s address—and what he said about you and the Copley award—in this week’s “Reader.” As it stands, I think you have had very fair measure of acknowledgement. But the passage in the third column, “on the Origin of Species”—has not been given—as it was delivered. The “Reader” has left out a little sentence or two. This will be explained to you hereafter.