Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  “I hope you have not murdered too completely your own & my child,” Darwin exclaimed in horror.116 Turning over the pages of Wallace’s article, he covered the text with pencil marks. “No!!!” he scrawled in the margin, underlining it three times.

  “If you had not told me, I should have thought that [your remarks] had been added by someone else.… I differ grieviously from you, and I am very sorry for it.”

  Before this, Darwin had always assumed he and Wallace stood pretty much together. “I was dreadfully disappointed about Man; it seems to me incredibly strange,” he confided to Lyell. But Lyell was defensive. “I rather hail Wallace’s suggestion that there may be a Supreme Will and Power which may not abdicate its functions of interference, but may guide the forces and laws of Nature.”117

  Bit by bit, Wallace told Darwin of his belief in the existence of spirit forces and the untapped depths of the human mind. There must be something else other than mere matter in this world, Wallace maintained: “whether we call it God, or spirit,” it must play an important role in human evolution. Earnestly, he confessed his long-term fascination with séances and spiritualism.

  My opinions on the subject have been modified solely by the consideration of a series of remarkable phenomena, physical & mental, which I have now had every opportunity of fully testing, & which demonstrate the existence of forces & influences not yet recognised by science. This will I know seem to you like some mental hallucination.… I am in hopes that you will suspend your judgment for a time till we exhibit some corroborative symptoms of insanity.118

  Frustrated beyond measure, Darwin wondered whether Wallace might destroy their ten-year-old project with this talk of mysterious forces and powers. It would not perhaps have mattered so much to him if the Quarterly Review article had been written by a lesser figure. Nor would he have regarded its publication in a leading literary magazine as insurmountable. But for one of the joint propounders of natural selection publicly to suggest that natural selection should now be modified to incorporate spiritual intervention would surely hand victory to their opponents. The Morning Post said it all: “Mr. Wallace’s reference … to a Creator’s will undermines Mr. Darwin’s whole hypothesis.”119 Wallace’s easy brilliance, so wayward, so innovative, so undisciplined, comprehensively collided with Darwin’s innermost beliefs.

  Wallace was unrepentant. His life had been transformed by spiritualism when Mrs. Marshall, a well-known medium, tapped out a message from his dead brother Herbert. He now moved easily among the phrenologists, mesmerists, table-rappers, and mediums who provided increasing numbers of Victorians with an alternative to organised religion. These men and women offered him insights into the other world that he thought must exist alongside the material universe. He said that he personally possessed “considerable mesmeric power,” although not as good as his brother Herbert. He felt tables move, saw flowers appear, heard “curious musical phenomena.”

  In giving this rapt attention to spirits, Wallace was fully a man of his time and place. His thoughts always dwelled on the larger metaphysical frame, his inquiries always probed the meaning of existence. Where Huxley wrote of “man’s place in nature,” Wallace was ultimately to compose a book called Man’s Place in the Universe. Interest in these forms of pheneomena was then coming to its height, sometimes reflecting a growing curiosity about the way the mind worked, as revealed by hypnotism, mesmerism, prophecy, religious trances and mysticism, and by apparent evidence for miracles and the occasional appearance of ghosts.120 The invisible operations of electricity and magnetism fell into the same category, especially when similarities between the long-distance tappings of the electric telegraph and the taps of a spirit guide were noted. On the larger scale, interest in spiritualism also represented a yearning for certainty in an age of uncertainty, the very Victorian hope that there was more to this life than material form, a craving probably exacerbated by the doubts raised by the Origin of Species and other secularising works. In Lyell’s house, for example, there was a quest for greater spiritual knowledge. Arabella Buckley, Lyell’s secretary, was an enthusiastic participant in séances, allowing herself to be mesmerised and used as a channel for communication. When Wallace’s son Bertie died in 1874, at the age of six, Buckley tried to contact the dead boy on Wallace’s behalf. Scarcely able for grief to deal with the messages that she brought him, Wallace discovered his belief in the spirit world was enmeshed with his own personal unhappiness.

  Time after time he urged Darwin and other scientists to experience spiritualism without prejudice or cynicism. “I had many opportunities of witnessing some of the more extraordinary phenomena under the most favourable conditions,” he insisted, inviting all of them at one time or another to accompany him to a séance. William Carpenter and John Tyndall accepted but were dismissive of what they saw. “It is not lack of logic that I see,” complained Tyndall, “but a willingness that I deplore to accept data which are unworthy of your attention.” Huxley was less inclined to beat about the bush. “I never cared for gossip in my life, and disembodied gossip, such as these worthy ghosts supply their friends with, is not more interesting to me than any other.”121

  Forced to look elsewhere, Wallace gained support from Robert Chambers. “We have only to enlarge our conception of what is natural, and all will be right,” Chambers told him.122 However, his passions were stirred in 1868 by an attack by G. H. Lewes in a number of the Pall Mall Gazette in which Lewes unmasked Mrs. Hayden, a popular medium, as a fraud. In her defence, Wallace set about collecting testimonies and evidence for mediumship, including his own adventure of crouching under a table to verify that an accordion was being played by unseen hands. His Darwinian friends began to wonder if he was becoming something of a liability to the world of professional Victorian science.

  Darwin could not believe in any of this. After the jokes died away, he feared that such enthusiasms would lead Wallace astray. It astonished him that an observational naturalist of Wallace’s stature could be taken in by what he regarded as obvious fictions. Nor, in his opinion, did the idea of a spiritual world advance the question of human evolution.

  I am very glad you are going to publish all your papers on Nat Selection: I am sure you are right, & that they will do our cause much good. But I groan over Man—you write like a metamorphosed (in retrograde direction) naturalist, & you the author of the best paper that ever appeared in Anth. Review! Eheu Eheu Eheu, Your miserable friend, C. Darwin.123

  He had waited long enough. He acknowledged to another friend that he felt “taunted with concealing my opinions.”124 Once again Wallace forced him into a full show of speed.

  chapter

  9

  SON OF A MONKEY

  ARWIN CALCULATED that it took him two years to write The Descent of Man—three or maybe four if he included all his preliminary work on sexual selection and facial expressions. Inexorably, the number of pages kept increasing. In the end, the book was published in two thick volumes by John Murray in February 1871. “I shall be well abused,” its author murmured in uneasy anticipation.

  The book had, in fact, taken Darwin a lifetime to produce. He did much more than simply flesh out his old conviction that humans had evolved from animals. He brought all his accumulated natural history knowledge to bear on the question of human ancestry, all his experience of the human condition as learned from the Beagle voyage and from his life as a naturalist, husband, father, and friend. He was at last dealing with what he once called “the highest and most interesting problem for the naturalist.”1 From the start, he perceived his “Man book” as a necessary counterpart to the Origin of Species. In it he would deliberately cross the last frontier of the evolutionary doctrine that he and Wallace had set out to establish.

  II

  As was customary, he did not work in isolation. What was new and useful, however, was that he was able to take advantage of the shifts in scientific focus brought about in part by his own Origin of Species and call extensively on the researches of naturalist
s and anatomists already operating within the Darwinian scheme, consulting Huxley, Haeckel, Broca, Quatrefages, Claparède, Vogt, Wallace, Galton, Lubbock, and Tylor on many different points. He found specialists to guide him through areas relatively unfamiliar to him, such as the study of insanity or the history of slavery, and was able again to exploit his system of correspondents across the globe, his reviewers, and members of his family circle.

  His fame as an author helped. Nearly everyone was willing to assist him. “I read your last letter with very great pleasure,” wrote a government agent, William Winwood Reade, from Accra, on the west coast of Africa. “I should consider a letter from Darwin a treat anywhere—how much more so out here! I need scarcely say that anything I write to you is fully at your disposal. My only fear is that I cannot send you anything worth having.”2 Reade proved a useful source of anthroplogical information. And Darwin gave himself time to think about the work of his contemporaries in philosophy, language theory, and cultural history.

  Sometimes it was relatively easy to pin down the facts that he wanted. Thomas Woolner, the sculptor, was one source who received a questioning letter. Darwin said he had noticed that Woolner’s statue Puck, displayed in the Royal Academy’s galleries, sported a fine pair of pointed ears and asked if Woolner had ever encountered such in real life. Woolner was sufficiently intrigued to spend a Sunday or two examining monkeys at the zoo and then (more discreetly) studying his human portrait commissions as they sat to him in profile. He sent Darwin a drawing of a human ear which showed a small inward projection on the upper rim, and suggested that this might be the folded remains of a pointed animal-like tip.3 Darwin was pleased. “The Woolnerian tip is worth anything to me,” he replied, and put it in his book straight away.4 Even a trifle like this, Darwin wrote, indicated close structural links between animals and humans. The time will come, he declared, when it will be thought absurd to believe that the human race and each species of animal were “the work of a separate act of creation.”5

  He was less successful elsewhere. Fired by his research on plant and animal inbreeding for Variation Under Domestication, Darwin investigated the issue of cousin marriages through 1869 and 1870, hoping to establish the life expectancy of any children from such marriages. Admittedly, he aimed high. His ambitions for the “Man book” encouraged him to try to get a question about cousin marriages inserted into the 1871 population census, writing increasingly urgent letters to his political friends, John Lubbock, William Farr (at the registrar-general’s office), and Thomas Henry Farrer, among others, as the date for printing the census forms drew closer. “I am endeavouring to persuade Mr. Bruce to have inserted in Census [a] query whether in each household the parents are cousins,” he told Farrer in May 1870. “I am deeply convinced that this is an important subject: if you can influence any member of government, pray do so. Some few M.P.s will take up the question.—I have given my reasons in a Chapt in 2d. Vol. of my Domestic animals.”6

  Darwin’s interest hung on the supposed dangers of long-continued inbreeding among humans. He envisaged that a simple question on the national census—whether the householder was married to his cousin—would allow a correlation between the number of cousin marriages and the number of living offspring. These figures would provide a rough estimate of fertility between close relatives. Over the next few months he managed to persuade Lubbock to put a motion before the House of Commons and sought the backing of William Farr, the medical statistician who had done so much to bring the data collected by the registrar-general’s office into useful form. Darwin had previously corresponded with Farr about medical statistics and received from him on loan large volumes of printed reports on the diseases of the nation. Farr indicated that he might agree to Darwin’s request. One Sunday in the summer of 1870, said Emma, “the bell rang after lunch & in came Dr Farr about the census. Ch. had been rather done up thinking it was Snow [Julia Wedgwood], but it was wonderful how he revived & enjoyed talking & settling with him.”

  Darwin could scarcely have hoped to achieve this aim without friends in high places—an aim that reflected his standing in Victorian England. There was at that time no explicit tradition of medical questions on British census forms, or even religious affiliation, although information on the age, occupations, and marital status of every occupant of every household was required. From 1851 the forms had, however, included a question about physical disabilities of sight, hearing, and speech. As it happened, Darwin’s request was part of an escalating medical trend, and the 1871 census was due to be extended by Parliament to incorporate a question about “lunatics, imbeciles and idiots,” introduced by Farr at the request of eminent doctors. This question lasted for only one census and would be dropped in 1881. Householders were not willing to supply the information. Boldly, Darwin approached the Liberal home secretary, Henry Austin Bruce, afterwards Lord Aberdare, with his own proposal.

  Lubbock put the motion on the agenda in July 1870 and read out to the House of Commons a letter from Darwin on the issue, possibly the first time that a biologist’s opinions were formally announced in that company. “As you are aware, I have made experiments on the subject during several years,” the letter began.

  It is my clear conviction that there is now ample evidence of the existence of a great physiological law, rendering an enquiry with reference to mankind of much importance. In England & many parts of Europe the marriages of cousins are objected to from their supposed injurious consequences; but this belief rests on no direct evidence. It is therefore manifestly desirable that the belief should either be proved false, or should be confirmed, so that in this latter case the marriages of cousins might be discouraged. If the proper queries are inserted, the returns would show whether married cousins have in their households on the night of the census as many children, as have parents who are not related; & should the number prove fewer, we might safely infer either lessened fertility in the parents, or which is more probable, lessened vitality in the offspring. It is moreover much to be wished that the truth of the often repeated assertion that consanguineous marriages lead to deafness & dumbness, blindness &c, should be ascertained; & all such assertions could be easily tested by the returns from a single census.7

  The request was turned down, with at least two members of Parliament intimating that that it would be a dangerous precedent to satisfy the curiosity of “speculative philosophers.” It is entirely possible that several members of Parliament were themselves married to cousins, as indeed Queen Victoria had been married to hers, and the proposal may well have looked like unnecessary personal intrusion. Darwin’s influence had its limits. Lubbock felt personally responsible for the failure. “Do not you think you might get most of what you want by an enquiry at one or two of the largest idiot asylums?” he forlornly ventured.

  In actual fact, Darwin did make a stab at contacting the physician John Langdon Down, who worked at the Royal Earlswood Asylum for Idiots in Redhill. Langdon Down (whose career focused on congenital mental disorders and who gave his name to Down’s syndrome) had written a short article for Nature in 1870 suggesting that inbreeding might be harmful. “A methodical and judicious selection in the marriage of close relations would be of enormous value to the community in the improved race of man that would by that means be obtained,” Langdon Down claimed.8 This was precisely the point that Darwin was attempting to verify with the authority of numbers. The result of his contact with Langdon Down is unknown.

  He discovered an unexpected ally in his son George. Ever since Galton’s book Hereditary Genius, George had been intrigued by Galton’s proposals about inherited ability. Such proposals meshed with George’s interest in genealogy, and he had been happy to prepare family pedigree charts for Galton. Taking his father’s part, George complained bitterly about the unfavourable verdict of the House of Commons. “The tone taken by many members of the House shows how little they are permeated with the idea of the importance of inheritance to the human race.”9

  Nothing came of Darwin
’s plan, and he was obliged to let his book on mankind go ahead without the statistical data for which he had hoped.

  When the principles of breeding and inheritance are better understood, we shall not hear ignorant members of our legislature rejecting with scorn a plan for ascertaining by an easy method whether or not consanguineous marriages are injurious to man.10

  Pensively, he continued living out his own life with his cousin Emma, unsure of the burden of heredity he might have imposed on his own children.

  III

  His theory and his personal life were by now so closely intertwined that it was becoming difficult for him to maintain scholarly detachment. While preparing The Descent of Man he quarrelled irrevocably with a young naturalist of his acquaintance, St. George Mivart.

  Mivart was a talented evolutionary biologist who had quickly become a favourite of Huxley’s despite the potential for discord that lay in Mivart’s unwavering commitment to Catholicism. At first Mivart ignored Huxley’s theological taunts, believing they represented, in this instance, a form of rough-and-tumble affection. But in 1869 or so, Mivart parted company with Huxley and the close-knit band of Darwinians, coming to view the group as a dictatorial, self-regarding clique, a powerful brotherhood of older men at the summit of their careers who insisted that acolytes ought to adopt their position and advance the new biology in toto. In many ways Mivart read the situation accurately. The inner ring of private clubs and societies which ran scientific London—the X Club, the teaching laboratories and museums in South Kensington, the philosophers and parliamentarians in the Metaphysical Society and Athenaeum Club—were closed to outsiders. The members were influential people who kept a firm grasp on the tiller of scientific progress. Huxley enjoyed his cliques and believed that small groups of “right-minded men” were by far the most effective way to get things done.11