Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  Getting him to London turned out to be an exercise of near-military proportions, occupying Emma, Parslow, Erasmus, Henrietta, and Fanny and Hensleigh Wedgwood for the full space of a week. Emma arranged that the Down House contingent would stay with the Wedgwoods for the occasion, and she asked Fanny to purchase tickets for the ladies to go to Hamlet the night before and a Philharmonia concert the night after. Downe never seemed so far away from central London—a mere fifteen or sixteen miles for Emma, a continent for an enfeebled and apprehensive naturalist. The women laughed irreverently at his grumbles. They were determined he would go.

  On 27 April 1866 they dusted Darwin off and deposited him at the Royal Society’s front door dressed in his best. Henry Bence Jones welcomed him on the threshold almost as if he were a walking advertisement for medical science. “His Dr. Bence Jones was there and received him with triumph, as well he might, it being his own doing.”

  The royal presentation went well, although Darwin said that the prince obviously had not a clue who he was. But the most notable part of the evening was of a different order. After so many years of illness, none of his friends recognised him. “In the evening Papa dressed up quite tidy in his dress suit,” Emma wrote.

  It felt quite cheering to see him go. He staid more than an hour & saw every one of his old friends, who were delightfully cordial as soon as they found out who he was, which they never did till he told them owing to his beard. General Sabine presented him to the P. of Wales.… He made his most respectful bow & the P. muttered some little civility which he cd. not hear. The P. looked very nice & gentlemanlike but utterly uninterested in any of the things & curiosities. Papa was very much pleased with having gone. Yesterday was rather too fatiguing—a long call on Mr Grove, something about forces, then a long call from Sir C. Lyell who was so polite to Lizzie, standing up & talking a little to her.101

  She repeated the observation in another letter: “He was obliged to name himself to almost all of them, as his beard alters him so much.” Her husband returned home from his week in the metropolis dumbfounded by the effects of a long seclusion in the country.

  X

  Since Darwin would not go to his acolytes, they began to come to him. For some of his followers, the opportunity to visit Darwin started to resemble a religious pilgrimage. In 1866, Ernst Haeckel made a special trip to England from Jena during which he fulfilled a wish to call at Down House. By now Haeckel was a devoted follower. He praised Darwin in his own books and articles and lectured on Darwinismus. One student at Jena, Anton Dohrn, after a few sessions with Haeckel, came to believe that receiving a letter from Darwin was like being granted a “scientific knighthood.” Haeckel had just published Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866), which he dedicated to Goethe, Lamarck, and Darwin, describing them as the preeminent leaders of evolutionary theory. In this book he set out his expansive views on morphology, systematics, the genealogy of mankind, and embryology. He sent it to Darwin.

  Not for the first time Darwin wished that Camilla Ludwig was still part of the family economy. He found Haeckel’s written German very difficult to understand. He fought his way through Haeckel’s definitions of concepts like “ontogeny” and “phylogeny,” and the “biogenetic law” that encapsulated parallels between embryology and the evolutionary tree. “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” said Haeckel in densely packed German. Then Darwin worked his way through Haeckel’s subdivisions of heredity (conservative or progressive) and adapation (indirect or direct). He struggled past Monism, the philosophical position invented by Haeckel to convey the study of all biological phenomena on mechanistic and naturalistic lines. He contemplated dizzyingly complex illustrations of evolutionary history that showed the whole of living nature emerging from a single ancestral stem. “Your boldness sometimes makes me tremble,” he said, “but as Huxley remarked someone must be bold enough to make a beginning in drawing up tables of descent.”

  I received a few days ago a sheet of your new work, & have read it with great interest. You confer on my book, the “Origin of Species,” the most magnificent eulogium which it has ever received, & I am most truly gratified, but I fear if this part of your work is ever criticized, your reviewer will say that you have spoken much too strongly.… I shall feel very curious to read your remaining chapters when published; but it is a terrible evil to me that I cannot read more than one or two pages at a time of German, even when written as clearly as is your book.102

  Whatever else, the book served as an introduction and Darwin invited Haeckel to visit. He and his household planned the occasion cautiously. Darwin warned his guest in advance not to expect any “lengthy” scientific conversations. He felt a preemptive move in this direction was probably necessary, since Haeckel’s book indicated a garrulous propensity to run on. He invited Lubbock to join them for dinner to relieve any social pressure. He asked Hooker and Huxley to take a look at Haeckel first in London and save him the bother of bringing Haeckel up to date with contemporary natural history affairs. He wrote another letter to Lubbock, urgently asking whether perhaps Lubbock could take Haeckel away with him to High Elms for the night.

  The visit hardly justified so many precautions. Even though Darwin could scarcely decipher the other man’s heavy accent, and Haeckel shouted as if he were on a sailing ship, roaring against the winds and waves, their mutual interests carried them safely through. Haeckel treated Darwin as if he were a god.

  Tall and venerable … with the broad shoulders of an Atlas that bore a world of thought: a Jove-like forehead, as we see in Goethe, with a lofty and broad vault, deeply furrowed by the plough of intellectual work. The tender and friendly eyes were overshadowed by the great roof of the prominent brows. The gentle mouth was framed in a long, silvery beard.103

  Darwin reported that “I have seldom seen a more pleasant, cordial & frank man.”104 He and Emma called him “a great good-natured boy.” Of all the young men Darwin met, this was the one who most behaved like a religious disciple.

  Acolytes or no, Darwin’s reputation mounted steadily. At the British Association meeting in Nottingham in August 1866, Hooker sang his praises in terms that reverberated through the community. The other Darwinists had stepped aside for this meeting, saying that it was Hooker’s turn to push into the “ranks of the enemy.” Hooker chose botanical geography as the subject of his address. “Would you believe it, I have in cold blood, accepted an invitation to deliver an evening address on the Darwinian theory at Nottingham. I am utterly disgusted with my bravado,” he demurred.105 He intended to air his views on island floras and the possibility of their former connections to continental landmasses, a topic over which he and Darwin had argued contentedly for years. “I think I know ‘Origin’ by heart in relation to the subject,” he said.

  In this address Hooker also provided a sardonic résumé of the larger battles fought over the last six years, particularly alluding to the Oxford British Association meeting of 1860. He created an elaborate metaphor in order to do this, “a parable” he called it, describing his Darwinian friends as if they were a band of missionaries who had encountered “savages” with primitive convictions. Six years ago, he said, the missionaries had attended a gathering of those savages.

  The missionaries attempted to teach them, amongst other matters, the true theory of the moon’s motions, and at the first of the gatherings the subject was discussed by them. The presiding Satchem shook his head and spear. The priests … attacked the new doctrine, and with fury, their temples were ornamented with symbols of the old creed, and their religious chants and rites were worded and arranged in accordance with it. The medicine men, however, being divided among themselves (as medicine men are apt to be in all countries) some of them sided with the missionaries—many from spite to the priests, but a few, I could see, from conviction—and putting my trust in the latter, I never doubted what the upshot would be.

  Upwards of six years elapsed before I was again present at a similar gathering of these tribes; and I then found the p
residing Satchem treating the missionaries theory of the moon’s motions as an accepted fact, and the people applauding the new creed!

  Do you ask what tribes these were, and where their annual gatherings took place, and when? I will tell you. The first was in 1860, when the Derivative doctrine of species was first brought before the bar of a scientific assembly, and that the British Association at Oxford; and I need not tell those who heard our presiding Satchem’s address last Wednesday evening that the last was at Nottingham.106

  With a shimmer of understanding, the audience realised he was talking about them. They were the primitive tribe, at first resistant to new ideas, and now suitably enlightened. Fanny Wedgwood wrote to the family describing Hooker’s unexpected artistry. “When the Sachem began, for a minute or two we were all mystified & then there came such bursts of applause from the audience first & going on—It was so thoroughly enjoyed amid roars of laughter & noise making a most brilliant conclusion.… how I longed for you to hear the noise they made when Charles’ name was mentioned. ‘Our illustrious countryman’—it made us feel so grand.”107

  XI

  Soon afterwards Darwin agreed to have his photograph taken for an album of biographical memoirs written by Edward Walford and published in 1866. He had already elsewhere supplied information to Carus for the first scholarly bibliography of his works, and one or two other authors had put articles about him in dictionaries and encyclopedias of men of the times. Agreeing to Walford’s request marked the beginning of a different form of commemorative activity. His face and life were becoming interesting to the public beyond his contribution to biological science.

  Darwin posed for the photograph in the studio of Ernest Edwards, afterwards a notable photographer in the United States. This portrait revealed the ravages of a long illness. He looked frail, less confident, more like an invalid than in previous photographs taken only four or five years earlier, a different man from the pictures familiar to his friends. He sat again for Edwards for another album published by Walford in 1868, this time called Representative Men in Literature Science and Art, in which the handle of his walking stick can just be glimpsed. In both of these photographs, he gave the awkward impression of not knowing what to do with his hands.

  The results did not please. Darwin refrained from ordering any copies for his personal use, although Emma said that she thought Edwards’s pictures were very “true to life.” Perhaps Darwin had yet to learn to feel comfortable with the idea of pictorial fame.108 To send personal photographs to friends and relations was one thing. To see oneself in a newspaper or published album was quite another. Unused to self-advertisement, and by nature modest, Darwin may have felt that photography for public consumption was somewhat vulgar unless required by position. Certainly it was not yet clear in those early years of celebrity culture that the public might want to know what he looked like, or that his image would eventually become an integral element in his scientific distinction.

  This does not mean to say that he rejected the craze for photographic cartes de visite that took off in the late 1860s. On the contrary, he had his own cartes made by Maull and Fox, and then by other firms, and swopped them enthusiastically with naturalists. “One likes to have a picture in one’s mind of any one about whom one is interested.”109 After visiting Down House, Haeckel sent him a collection of cartes de visite of German biologists, to which Darwin replied that he “liked to know what people looked like.” Hooker, Dana, Quatrefages, Haeckel, Gray, Lyell, Huxley—he had pictures of them all. And they had him. Much of the friendly coherence of the Darwinian group, almost a family feeling at times, was encouraged by this exchange of photographs. For nineteenth-century communities coming to grips with the advancing technologies of images, the novelty of cheap portrait photography was immense.

  Something of the same novelty also eased into the world of print. Although Darwin declined to join Wallace for a double photographic portrait, as Adolf Meyer “coolly proposes,”110 he agreed to let Carus print his photograph as a frontispiece to the third German edition of the Origin of Species (1867), the first opportunity that people who were neither friends nor colleagues had of seeing his face. Previously mostly an empire of the mind, the world of learning was gradually becoming visual and personal. Portrait frontispieces—always a distinguished literary tradition—were giving way to photographic representations of living authors, each picture lending personal authority to his or her volume.111

  Statues were different again. In 1867, Darwin agreed to Erasmus’s suggestion that he should pose for a bust by Thomas Woolner. Erasmus assured him that he would make all the arrangements. This was to be a family piece, not for public display. Momentarily surprised when he heard the news, Hooker reminded Darwin that he had previously made an identical request that had been refused, and asked if he could have a copy made if this new proposal went ahead. “I thought that you had given up all idea about my bust,” responded Darwin.

  You cannot be such an ass as to think of a marble bust.—I shall be proud to give you a cast, & surely that will do. The bust is making for Erasmus; & we are fighting here, for Emma votes for a marble copy & I maintain it is absurd, & plaister of paris just as good, or any good enough [sic].112

  Because of Darwin’s ill health, the sittings did not take place until nearly a year later, in November 1868. When at last artist and model met at Downe, each was pleasantly intrigued by the other. Darwin discovered that Woolner was a large, loose-limbed, muscular giant, a founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite brethren, now sculpting the intellectual and liberal heroes of the era. Woolner’s bust of Tennyson, his portrait medallions, and his statues of Bacon and Moses showed his empathy for colossal subjects, and his capacity for conveying the dignity of thought. He had made a portrait medallion of George Warde Norman, one of Darwin’s neighbours, a former director of the Bank of England.

  And they found much to discuss. Darwin told him of his interest in human expressions, asking for Woolner’s professional advice as an artist. When Woolner revealed that he had tried his hand at portrait-painting in Sydney, they exchanged stories about their travels, and Darwin confided a youthful, half-baked plan to emigrate to Australia and search for gold. It turned out that Woolner had painted Philip Parker King in Sydney, commander of the first Beagle expedition and father of Midshipman King who shared a cabin with Darwin.113

  “I shd. have written long ago,” Darwin apologised to Hooker,

  but I have been pestered with stupid letters, & am undergoing the purgatory of sitting for hours to Woolner, who, however, is wonderfully pleasant & lightens, as much as man can, the penance.—As far as I can judge he will make a fine Bust, & I tell my wife she will be proud of her old husband.114

  It fell to Erasmus to convey the brotherly view. “I hope it won’t be very hideous which is the most that I expect.”115

  chapter

  8

  THE BURDEN OF HEREDITY

  N THE MIDST of all this ill health, Darwin devised a remarkable theory of inheritance. The achievement would have been noteworthy enough had he been well. For a sick man to have mustered the concentrated powers of thought that lay behind it was arresting. Much of the time he was literally battling with himself. In the end, he felt he understood where variations came from and how they were transmitted. He placed the idea at the heart of his Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, published in 1868, systematically building up the text to support it. He called the theory “pangenesis.”1

  Pangenesis was important to him because it plugged the gap left in the Origin of Species. Darwin knew that all his arguments would remain worryingly incomplete until the essential foundation stones of inheritance were located. Huxley told him so; the reviewers of the Origin constantly highlighted the point; he came up against the same stumbling block himself time after time. Now that a number of people were seemingly prepared to accept the general thrust of evolutionary ideas, this last gap loomed increasingly large. For natural selection fully to succeed he needed to
show that “organic beings … have varied largely and the variations have been inherited.” Pangenesis was constructed to fill the breach. “It is the facts and views to be hereafter given which have convinced me of the truth of the theory,” he wrote in the opening pages of the manuscript for Variation.

  As Darwin explained it, pangenesis was the highly abstract notion that every tissue, cell, and living part of an organism produced minute, unseen gemmules (or what he sometimes called granules or germs) which carried inheritable characteristics and were transmitted to the offspring via the reproductive process. He was careful to specify that each part of an organism produced only information about itself. There were gemmules for hands and feet, not for whole organisms. Individual gemmules did not contain a complete microscopic blueprint for an entire creature in the way that Herbert Spencer or Carl von Nägeli described. When the gemmules from each parent mixed in the foetus they would produce a unique new individual.