Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  Darwin’s book of Beagle travels in fact seemed to be the only thing that the French were willing to read. “Though I am so despised by the great guns of the Institute,” he protested to Hooker in 1869, “I presume I am rising in estimation amongst the mob, for another man has applied to translate my Journal of Travels.—Here is a boasting note.”78

  As a translated volume, Darwin’s Origin of Species was plainly dropping into a range of social contexts bursting with their own continuing trends of thought, several of which already included evolutionary ideas. Spanish authors took up the Origin’s call in 1869 with a flurry of commentaries on the chemical origin of living beings.79 In Italy, on the other hand, the intellectual elite already advocated secularism and evolutionary naturalism, to the point where Paolo Mantegazza suggested that science itself should become a religion. As expounded by Italian positivists, Darwin’s theory was above all seen as a genealogy of living forms rather than an explanation of the method of change.80 The Origin of Species was partially translated into Italian by Giovanni Canestrini, the pioneering zoologist, in 1864. But it was Filippo de Filippi who, in Turin, really generated discussion with his article “Man and the Monkeys,” stimulated by Huxley’s book. Filippi accepted all the basic arguments put forward by Huxley but maintained that human morality could not be explained by descent from the animal kingdom.81 These polemics encouraged Canestrini to publish the complete text of the Origin in 1865, followed by an influential book titled Origine dell’uomo in 1866. Shortly thereafter, the botanist Federico Delpino began an analysis of Darwin’s experimental work on plants, sustained by a non-Darwinian belief in the directed and progressive nature of evolution.

  The story was generally the same in Australia, New Zealand, the United States of America, and Canada—each nation divided from Britain by a common language. The Origin’s author plugged away at them all. Whether for or against him, or willing to meet him at some point halfway, men and women across the globe began participating in one of the first international scientific debates.

  VIII

  Day after day, Darwin spiraled downwards physically. “When you meet Busk, ask him whether any man is better than Jenner for giving life to a worn out poor Devil,” he implored Hooker in 1865. His wife, Emma, began to wilt under the strain. “I have taken a little to gardening this summer and have often felt surprised when I was feeling sad enough how cheering a little exertion of that sort is.”82 Keen to have company, she installed an elderly aunt at Down House to play cards with her in the evenings after Darwin had gone to bed. With her ear trumpet and tendency to stand in front of the fire monopolising the newspaper, Aunt Fanny proved an irritating addition to the household.83 When she went home to Wales, Emma noticed how Darwin “brightened up very much the last day.”84

  Whichever doctor he called in, conventional medicine only partially relieved the miseries. He revived a bit when he came across eccentric Dr. John Chapman, the former editor and owner of the Westminster Review, who was closely connected to George Eliot and her circle. Chapman was company of a kind Darwin rarely encountered. Although more or less properly qualified as a medical man, he regarded doctoring as a last-ditch insurance against disaster in the publishing world. Every so often he put a handful of expensive therapeutic gadgets on the market, relying more on medical fads and fashions than on proven practice. Ice-bags for seasickness and nausea were his current venture, and it was an advertisement for these that brought Darwin’s letter to his door. Chapman knew everybody: Huxley, Spencer, Lewes, Dickens, Tom Taylor of the Times, John Stuart Mill, and Harriet Martineau and her brother James. He was moreover impressed by the Origin of Species, saying in his diary that it was “likely to effect an immense mental revolution.”85 Darwin liked him immediately and wrote to him about his symptoms more openly than to any other man, “Tongue crimson in morning … evacuation regular & good. Urine scanty,” and so on.86

  Chapman’s cures were as ineffective as the rest. He certainly pandered to Darwin’s yearning for uncomfortable remedies (or to his desperation) by selling him a set of rubber water-bags of various sizes that were to be chilled and worn next to the spine every day for a hour or two. “Ice is a direct sedative to the spinal cord,” Chapman wrote in one of his medical handbooks.87 Darwin strapped these bags to his lower back three times a day. He seems not to have felt either foolish or gullible about this. Cold, inconvenient, and bulky as they were, at least he could trudge round the Sandwalk at regular intervals. It soon became obvious that “Ice to spine did nothing.” But the rubber bags were not wasted. Long afterwards, when William took a boat across the English Channel, his thrifty father recommended that he wear them as a precaution against seasickness.

  Then came Henry Bence Jones from St. George’s Hospital in London, altogether a more regular kind of physician, who tested Darwin’s urine for proteins and uric acid and diagnosed suppressed gout. Jones was a keen disciple of Justus von Liebig’s philosophy of chemistry and believed wholeheartedly in analyzing the chemical constituents of the blood at a time when haematology and laboratory researches were not yet an established part of medical therapy. Nutritional imbalances were his forte. He made Darwin stop eating the sugary foods he liked best and advised that acidifying liquid medicines like colchicum and bitter aloes should take the place of sticky puddings. “I have been half starved to death,” his patient moaned after a couple of weeks of this, “and am 15 lb lighter, but I have gained in walking power & my vomiting is immensely reduced.” It was unlucky, said Francis Darwin, “that so many Drs forbade him sweet things, for which he had a boylike love.”

  He often said that the meat of dinner very dull, & the sweets the only part worth. He was not very successful in keeping the vows which he made not to eat sweets; and didn’t consider them binding [unless] he made them aloud. He often made a vow aloud after breaking a silent vow.88

  Furthermore, he was forbidden by doctors to eat bacon, continued Francis. “But as it suited him particularly well he never obeyed, and used to laugh at the whole race of Drs for their spite to bacon.”

  Jones also prescribed exercise “to get the chemistry going.” At first he suggested yachting, tipping his hat to the customary medical advice for affluent Victorians. Jones may have recognised Darwin’s mental unrest and thought the old-fashioned remedy of a change of scene would work as well as any other. In the event, Darwin stayed at home and began horse-riding instead, buying a steady old gelding called Tommy from a local dealer (the boys tested it out beforehand) and jogging along the country paths for a year or two before taking a bad tumble and deciding he was too old for the venture.

  Yet there was no escaping the mournful atmosphere at Down House. Death tugged at the heartstrings when Robert FitzRoy committed suicide in April 1865, cutting his throat with a razor, a ghastly reenactment of his uncle Lord Castlereagh’s own suicide. Darwin was taken aback. With a pang of uneasy familiarity, he saw in this last act much of his former captain’s impetuous, unstable, and courageous behaviour.89

  “Ch. was very sorry about FitzRoy—but not much surprised. He remembered him almost insane once in the Beagle,” said Emma. They had heard intermittently about FitzRoy’s deteriorating existence. For years FitzRoy had been aware of the deadly outcomes of his Fuegian philanthropy. The three indigenous Fuegians, whom he had taken to England, Christianised, and reintroduced to Tierra del Fuego during the Beagle voyage, had reverted to their aboriginal behaviour. In the 1840s, a Christian mission to Tierra del Fuego had starved to death near the Beagle Channel. Poor organization was to blame. Then Jemmy Button, one of FitzRoy’s original three, helped establish another mission in Woollya Sound, which ended in the massacre of every single European. FitzRoy took that news badly. According to the ship’s captain who had dropped the missionaries off in Woollya, Jemmy had shouted to the officers from his canoe in perfect English and asked for a pair of braces for his trousers. He went on board and gave them a gift for his old captain.90 FitzRoy was devastated by Jemmy’s apparent treachery (although
it was never clear whether Jemmy was directly involved in the massacre).

  Furthermore, FitzRoy’s work at the Meteorological Office was persistently undervalued. Admittedly, he was a demanding perfectionist. But his attempts to introduce scientifically based weather forecasts and storm warnings for sailors at sea were the constant butt of Victorian satire. “Nature seems to have taken special pleasure in confounding the conjectures of science,” jibed the Times after another unexpected hurricane disrupted the countryside. FitzRoy took every criticism personally. The wreck of the Royal Charter off the coast of Anglesey, with dreadful loss of life, turned his mission into a moral crusade.91 He argued with Lieutenant Maury in Washington over the meteorological causes of storms and how to predict their arrival. Darwin heard all about it from Bartholomew Sulivan, now an admiral himself, when Sulivan paid an autumn visit to Down House. The two old comrades shook their heads over FitzRoy’s depressions and misplaced ardour.

  I never knew in my life so mixed a character. Always much to love & I once loved him sincerely; but so bad a temper & so given to take offence, that I gradually quite lost my love & wished only to keep out of contact with him. Twice he quarreled bitterly with me, without any just provocation on my part. But certainly there was much noble & exalted in his character.92

  When Darwin heard that Mrs. FitzRoy was left penniless he sent a cheque for £100 (about £5,000 in modern terms), a large sum that probably indicated guilty feelings towards the memory of his captain.93 He did not feel nearly as sad as he ought to have done. In much the same way as he responded to Henslow’s death, he quickly pushed the inconvenience of grief and regret aside.

  Old Sir John Lubbock died too, leaving his fortune, title, banking firm, High Elms estate, and village charities to his son John, Darwin’s friend. These long-awaited riches burned in Lubbock’s pocket, and soon afterwards, he decided to run for Parliament. Darwin regretted the decision, for he felt Lubbock’s election as an M.P. would be a loss for science. Nevertheless, he loyally subscribed to the West Kent Liberal Association, discovered a new interest in the Maidstone newspapers, where Lubbock intended fighting for a seat, and told him he would “be very sorry if he succeeded but very sorry if he was beaten.”94 Underneath lay the unspoken assumption that the two shared the same kind of forward-looking politics found in Palmerston and Lord Russell’s Liberal party. These were exciting times, with an increasingly split party system giving rise to weak coalition governments beset by confused policies. In 1865, Lubbock hoped to join Palmerston’s administration, although whether Palmerston would live that long was a well-aired problem. Over the next five years there were to be three changes of government brought about by deaths and resignations. Darwin looked forward to political discussions with Lubbock, for he enjoyed after-dinner governance as much as any man of his acquaintance.

  Lubbock was beaten. “It made me grieve his taking to politics,” said Darwin afterwards, “and though I grieve that he has lost his election, yet I suppose, now that he is once bitten, he will never give up politics, and science is done for. Many men can make fair M.P.s; and how few can work in science like him!”95

  Lubbock did not achieve electoral success until 1870, thereafter representing West Kent as a Liberal for eighteen years before changing tack on the Irish question and subsequently representing London University for the Unionists. He received a peerage in 1900 and moved to the House of Lords as Baron Avebury, the “banking baronet,” renowned for safeguarding archaeological sites like the stone circle at Avebury (from which he took his title) and Stonehenge, and for introducing the concept of bank holidays, national days of leisure. All through this process Darwin wished Lubbock could give more time to science. As an ambitious youth, Lubbock had once confided to him that he hoped to become president of the Royal Society, lord mayor of London, and chancellor of the exchequer, and Darwin reflected that Lubbock was good enough to have achieved any one of these had he been “willing to forgo the other two.” Lubbock never produced the innovative biological research of which he was capable. His scientific impact afterwards lay in popular expositions of natural history topics, especially his best-selling Ants, Bees and Wasps, and in his parliamentary work and government policy.

  The deaths continued. In 1865, William Jackson Hooker died, leaving his son Joseph Hooker the herbarium, library, and directorship of Kew Gardens, a mixed blessing that Hooker tackled resourcefully. In his hands Kew’s scientific and imperial role expanded dramatically. And in 1866, Darwin’s sisters Catherine and Susan died.

  Catherine Darwin went first. Her life had taken a very different turn three years beforehand when, in 1863, she married Charles Langton, the widower of her cousin Charlotte (Emma’s sister). Although Langton was by no means a blood relation, and was breaking no ecclesiastical rule by moving so promptly from a Wedgwood to a Darwin, the marriage seemed vaguely indecent to some of the older members of the circle. Mutual loneliness was an obvious motivating factor. Yet Catherine Darwin was never completely well and Langton was so set in his ways that Emma doubted whether they could be happy. The Darwin brothers rearranged the family finances to provide Catherine with a trust fund that would have matched old Dr. Darwin’s wishes. They put William Darwin, the next generation’s banker, in charge.

  “Her life was an abortive one with her high capacities,” grieved the combined womenfolk, a story that must surely have been repeated over and over again in the social tapestry of middle-class women’s lives.96 After this death, Langton lived on for another twenty years, outlasting most of his Darwin and Wedgwood brothers-in-law, a tall, benign man who had early on renounced his position as a clergyman apparently after experiencing all the doubts of a culturally engaged Victorian. Although nothing is known about Langton’s private thoughts, close contact with Darwin’s theories probably played some part in eroding his faith. Emma scarcely mentioned him in her letters, except to say, “Poor C.L. I suppose it is doubts about future life [that] trouble him.” His story was one of the lost tales behind the Darwin and Wedgwood chronicle: always there, never mentioned. One Wedgwood grandson, however, remembered him as an integral member of the pack of great-uncles.

  There were my grandfather [Frank Wedgwood] and his three brothers [Hensleigh, Harry, and Jos], and his brothers-in-law, Charles Darwin, and Charles Langton—all eighty-ish, all grey, all towering, while countless little cousins ran about below them on the floor. They never laughed; they never seemed to be angry.… They had read everything, and knew everything, and had their own judgement on everything. The opinion of the world mattered to them not one jot. Their standards were law, and we would as soon have disputed with the Deity.97

  Susan Darwin died unmarried a few months afterwards, bringing the Shrewsbury era to an end. Erasmus was profoundly upset. Susan was his favourite, the one he considered most like their father in personality, a clever, unsentimental woman, full of an unshakeable belief in home-made jam and the value of conversations about pigs with Parslow. Emma used to have the windows cleaned before Susan visited Downe. She would stay with Erasmus in London for the winter season, going to the theatre and exhibitions together, she criticising his housekeeping, he indiscreet about his London cronies, each reassured by the other’s predictible attitudes. She was at Erasmus’s house in London when she died. “What a very easy thing death is,” he wrote to Fanny Wedgwood. Darwin told Lyell (who knew her well) that Susan suffered greatly and that there had been no hope of recovery. The Mount in Shrewsbury was sold, the furniture auctioned off.

  IX

  Darwin began to feel slightly better in the spring of 1866. He resumed his writing on the variation of domestic animals and plants and undertook to provide Murray with a fourth edition of the Origin of Species. This new edition of the Origin took him eight or ten weeks to complete and was published in December 1866. He revised the text throughly to include fresh material drawn from his friends’ recent publications and answered a number of criticisms posed by reviewers, glad that he kept the reviews and correspondence close t
o hand.

  Soon he felt well enough to venture to the Royal Society for a soirée attended by the young Prince of Wales (later Edward VII). This gala evening was an important event in the society’s calendar, hosted by the president, Edward Sabine. Sabine usually held three such soirées during the season, but “Bertie,” the royal princeling, had never agreed to come before. His interests took more of a social and sporting turn, although he admired the Oxford and Cambridge professors who had formerly tutored him. Privately, Sabine regretted the untimely death of Prince Albert, an enthusiastic patron of the cultured world, who valued the role of science and technology in Britain rather more than his son, and endorsed the Royal Society’s place in the established scheme of things.98 But the presence of the Prince of Wales as a royal patron was appropriate and would add considerably to the Royal Society’s annual celebration of Victorian achievement. As was customary, ladies were not invited. As was customary too, the society’s rooms in Burlington House were crammed with exhibits and working demonstrations. Natural philosophers roamed the stalls, familiarising themselves with developments in fields outside their usual domain.99 At the soirée that Darwin attended there were telegraph cables encrusted with barnacles, photographs of sun-spots, a measuring device used during the Trigonometric Survey of India, and a cannonball retrieved from Fort Sumter. “The President’s reception was an evening to be remembered,” said J. W. Rogers in a note afterwards.100 Three fellows of the Royal Society were to be presented to the royal party. Darwin was invited to be one of them—an honour that tickled his vanity but threw Emma and the Down House staff into consternation.