by Janet Browne
The larvae of Ascidians are related to the Vertebrata, in their manner of development, in the relative position of the nervous system, and in possessing a structure closely like the chorda dorsalis of vertebrate animals. It thus appears, if we may rely on embryology, which has always proved the safest guide in classification, that we have at last gained a clue to the source whence the Vertebrata have been derived.57
At the end of his discussion of the human family tree he paid tribute to the variety and depth of Haeckel’s learning, declaring that if Haeckel had published earlier his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (1868, English translation 1870), in which he discussed the genealogy of mankind, Darwin would not have pursued his own volume on the same subject.
This was a startling ancestry to propose. Yet even the most traditionally minded would see something admirable in Darwin’s absolute sincerity. William Darwin Fox regarded his cousin’s work with interest. He was not as surprised as he felt he ought to be. It was a curious situation for him—as a country parson—to have a dangerous author as a friend and relative.
I suppose you are about to prove man is a descendant from Monkeys &c &c. Well, Well!—I shall much enjoy reading it. I have given up that point now. The three main points of difference to my mind—were that Men drink, smoke & thrash their wives—& Beasts do not.… I do not think even you will persuade me that my ancestors ever were Apes—but we shall see. I have no religious scruples about any of these matters. I see my own way clearly thro them—but I see many points I cannot get over, which prevent my going “the whole Hog” with you.… Why do not you & Mrs. Darwin run over here, when you have finished your Book—& you can study my little Apes & Apesses.58
VII
At the centre lay Darwin’s idea of sexual selection. This was his special contribution to the evolutionary story of mankind, his answer to Wallace, Lyell, and others, and to all the reviewers and critics of the previous twelve years. “I do not intend to assert that sexual selection will account for all the differences between the races,” he wrote in his book. Nonetheless, he felt certain that it was “the main agent in forming the races of man.” Sexual selection was “the most powerful means of changing the races of man that I know.”
In brief, Darwin claimed that human beings were like animals in that they possess many trifling features that are preserved and developed solely because they contribute to reproductive success. Just as peacocks had developed tail feathers to enhance their chances in the mating game, so humans had developed characteristic traits that promoted individual reproductive success. These traits were fluid, changeable, and not directly related to adaptation and survival. But Darwin pushed this claim far beyond the mere acquisition of secondary sexual characteristics. By these means he thought he could also explain the divergent geographical and behavioural attributes of human beings, such as skin colour, hair texture, maternal feelings, bravery, social cohesion, and so forth. Preference for certain skin colours was a good example. Men would chose wives according to localised ideas of beauty, he suggested. The skin colour of a population would gradually shift as a consequence.
Similarly, sexual selection among humans could enhance mental traits such as maternal love, bravery, altruism, obedience, hard work, and the “ingenuity” of any given population; that is, human choice would go to work on the basic animal instincts and push them in particular directions.
The strongest and most vigorous men—those who could best defend and hunt for their families, and during later times the chiefs or headmen—those who were provided with the best weapons and who possessed the most property, such as a larger number of dogs or other animals, would have succeeded in rearing a greater average number of offspring than would the weaker, poorer and lower members of the same tribes. There can also be no doubt that such men would generally have been able to select the more attractive women.… If then the several foregoing propositions be admitted, and I cannot see that they are doubtful, it would be an inexplicable circumstance if the selection of the more attractive women by the more powerful men of each tribe, who would rear on average a greater number of children, did not after the lapse of many generations modify to a certain extent the character of the tribe.59
In effect, humanity made itself by producing and preserving differences, a process that broadly mirrored his understanding of artificial selection in which farmers chose traits for “use or ornament,” impressing their own taste or judgement on organisms.
He ventured onto thorny ground when he analysed human societies in this way. His naturalism explicitly cast the notion of race into evolutionary and biological terms, reinforcing contemporary ideas of a racial hierarchy that replicated the ranking of animals. And he had no scruple in using the cultural inequalities between populations to substantiate his evolutionary hypothesis. Darwin certainly believed that the moral and cultural principles of his own people, and of his own day, were by far the highest that had emerged in evolutionary history. He believed that biology supported the marriage bond. He believed in innate male intellectual superiority, honed by the selective pressures of eons of hunting and fighting.
To avoid enemies, or to attack them with success, to capture wild animals, and to invent and fashion weapons, requires the aid of the higher mental faculties, namely, observation, reason, invention, or imagination. These various faculties will thus have been continually put to the test, and selected during manhood.… Thus man has ultimately become superior to woman.60
The possibility of female choice among humans hardly ruffled the surface of his argument, although he repeatedly claimed that female choice was the primary motor for sexual selection in animals. Primitive societies, he conceded, may be matriarchal or polygamous. However, he regarded this as an unsophisticated state of affairs, barely one step removed from animals. Advanced human society, to Darwin’s mind, was patriarchal, based on what was then assumed about primate behaviour and the so-called “natural” structure of civilised societies. For Darwin, it was self-evident that in civilised regimes men did the choosing. A limited number of women might sometimes be in a position to choose their mate (he was perhaps thinking of heiresses, or royalty, or beautiful heroines in novels). But his vision of mating behaviour was an explicit expression of his class and gender. His personality was evident too. His description of courting practices in The Descent of Man gave a romanticised picture of “rustics” at a country fair, “courting and quarrelling over a pretty girl, like birds at one of their places of assemblage.” For him, Victorian males set the evolutionary compass.
Try as he might, he could not escape the complications of his work. “I find the man-essay very interesting but very difficult; & the difficulties of the Moral sense have caused me much labour,” he told Asa Gray in 1870.61 He was anxious about breaking new ground in so many different areas. Above all, he wanted to get these notions about sexual selection absolutely right. “Sexual selection has been a tremendous job,” he wrote to Wallace. “Fate has ordained that almost every point on which we differ shd. be crowded into this vol.”62
VIII
At last he finished and dispatched the manuscript to John Murray, his publisher. Murray flinched a little at the subject matter. Despite his familiarity with Darwin’s unorthodox topics and his determination not to let them stand in the way of a successful business relationship, this book on human ancestry rattled his belief in the Bible story rather more than the Origin of Species had done. Gingerly, he asked his friend Whitwell Elwin for his opinion and was not surprised at the blast that came back by return of post. Elwin was no longer editor of Murray’s Quarterly Review but he still possessed the principles of a country clergyman. “It might be intelligible that a man’s tail should waste away when he had no longer occasion to wag it,” he roared, “though I should have thought that savages would still have found it useful in tropical climates to brush away insects.… The arguments in the sheets you have sent me appear to me to be little better than drivel.”63
Murray partly agreed. Bit by
bit, in his spare time in the evenings, the publisher began piecing together a scientific commentary of his own, a modest criticism of Lyell and his associates that he called Scepticism in Geology, published in 1877 under the nom de plume “Verifyer,” in which he politely, but decisively, disassociated himself from the secular natural history he had successfully placed before the public. Murray was neither a radical nor a conservative in religious affairs, being middle-of-the-road, and his personal dilemma over the age of the earth and “natural development in other branches of natural history” surely reflected at least some of the discomfiture of many of Darwin’s more ordinary readers. Insofar as Murray ever let his personal opinions show, this was it. He answered back.
Henrietta Darwin was evidently made of sterner stuff, for she corrected the proofs of Descent of Man while she was in the south of France with her cousins Edmund and Lena Langton, scarcely turning a hair at her father’s blunt talk about sexual display. In asking her to do this, Darwin relied on her editorial competence. When Thomas Farrer met Henrietta at a social event in London later that winter, he “chastised” her humorously on Darwin’s behalf for being out on the town enjoying herself when The Descent of Man was not yet published.
Henrietta had first read proofs for her father when she was eighteen and he was producing Orchids; and he had increasingly leaned on her during his long illness from 1864 to 1866. All members of the family were accustomed to help with his books in one way or another. Francis remembered how his father would correct proofs first in pencil, and then in ink, getting the younger children to rub out the pencil marks afterwards. Emma sometimes copied manuscripts for him, a point substantiated by one of the few surviving pages of the original manuscript of The Descent of Man being in her handwriting.64 She would read proofs, too, although “chiefly for misprints and to criticise punctuation; & then my father used to dispute with her over commas especially.” Henrietta’s role as editor grew naturally out of the rest. She was good at it. “He often used to say what a good critic Hen. was, & would sometimes laughingly quote her pencil notes, such as ‘this sentence is horrid.’ ”65 There is little evidence to suggest that Darwin used her merely as a convenient feminine censor, or as a ready-made moral vigilante, helping him to identify in The Descent of Man any hint of nineteenth-century impropriety.
On the contrary, she tightened his prose, wrote comments in the margin, and indicated passages that were hard to understand. These were all tasks he felt unable to ask his men friends to undertake. A friendly appreciation of each other’s intellect began to emerge, a mutual sympathy appreciated by both of them. Strictly demarcated as their intellectual input was, Darwin evidently appreciated his women for their advice as well as their labour.
He could not stop himself issuing a slew of fatherly instructions.
My dear H.
Please read the Ch. first right through without a pencil in your hand, that you may judge of general scheme; as, also, I particularly wish to know whether parts are extra tedious; but remember that M.S is always much more tedious than print.—The object of Ch. is simply comparison of mind in men & animals: in the next chapt. I discuss progress of morals &c.… I do not send foot-notes, as I have no copy & they are almost wholly mere authorities.—After reading once right through, the more time you can give up for deep criticism or corrections of style, the more grateful I shall be.—Please make any long corrections on separate slips of paper, leaving narrow blank edge, & pin them to margin of each sheet, so that I can turn each back, & read whilst still attached to its proper page.—This will save me a world of troubles. Heaven only knows what you will think of the whole, for I cannot conjecture.—You are a very good girl indeed to undertake the job.… (I fear parts are too like a Sermon: who wd. ever have thought that I shd. turn parson?)66
Henrietta must have cut a curious figure abroad, spending the morning correcting her father’s account of sexual selection, then putting on a bonnet and shawl to stroll along the promenade in “wicked Monaco,” the fashionable gambling resort and centre of the European beau monde. This dual experience probably did more to mould her views about human relationships than any other before her marriage. She liked working with her father and felt she understood his arguments. In fact, she surely learned more about men’s biological urges than her parents ever expected her to know. It is clear from the few proof sheets that are still in existence that she read the whole manuscript, ranging from the sexual attractiveness of beards to the numerical proportion of the sexes.
“Your corrections & suggestions are excellent,” Darwin assured her. “I have adopted the greater number, & I am sure that they are very great improvements.—Some of the transpositions are most just. You have done me real good service; but by Jove how hard you must have worked & how thoroughily [sic] you have mastered my M.S. I am pleased with this chapter now that it comes fresh to me.” He signed himself “Your affectionate, admiring & obedient Father.”67 Afterwards he gave her a gift of £30 from the profits as acknowledgement of the help he had received. “Several reviewers speak of the lucid, vigorous style, &c. Now I know how much I owe to you in this respect, which includes arrangement, not to mention still more important aids in the reasoning.”68
Notwithstanding these womanly interventions, Emma Darwin experienced misgivings about the book’s subject matter. “I think it will be very interesting, but that I shall dislike it very much as again putting God further off,” she sighed to Henrietta. These thoughts were not shared with Darwin. Husband and wife were probably too set in their individual ways for any discussion on the point to have made a difference. They each knew the other’s position. Moreover, they both apparently felt easier confiding in Henrietta. Even so, Emma also read the proofs of the Descent of Man with a conscientious desire to be helpful. She warned her husband of the dangers of too much anthropomorphism. “F. is putting Polly into his Man book but I doubt whether I shall let it stand,” she remarked. Only a wife could be so candid about a favoured example. Polly was Henrietta’s dog, a small terrier, as devoted to Darwin as Darwin was to her. “A fond grandfather is not to be trusted,” declared Emma robustly.69
Shortly afterwards Darwin discovered that his publisher was apprehensive about the subject too. Apes, reproductive behaviour patterns, and human beings in the same book struck John Murray as a recipe for disaster.
It is with a view to remove any impediments to its general perusal that I wd. call your attention to the passage respecting the proportion of advances made by the two Sexes in Animals. I wd. suggest that it might be toned down—as well as any other sentences liable to the imputation of indelicacy if there be any.70
Surprised, Darwin inquired which passages Murray found indelicate. When these were disclosed, he changed them into direct quotations from the original authors. A month later, Murray was back with worries about the title. Darwin’s proposal had been simple—“On the Origin of Man.” But Murray wanted something less provocative, something more closely related to the contents, more explanatory for intended purchasers. He rejected Darwin’s next suggestion, feeling that the word “sexual” could not be used on a title page. “The Descent of Man & Selection according to Sex,” would be much better, he proposed, and would “get rid of an objectionable adjective.”71 It was later changed to “in relation to sex.”
This time around, Murray prepared a number of special copies for Darwin to present to his friends. These Darwin signed personally, full of warm regard for the men who had come such a long way with him. “I hear you have gone to press, & I look forward with fear & trembling to being crushed under a mountain of facts!” remarked Wallace with a friendly smile.72
Despite the worries, the Descent of Man was the first of Darwin’s titles to make a handsome publishing profit when it was published in February 1871. “I suppose abuse is as good as praise for selling a book,” remarked its author. Murray sent a cheque to Darwin for £1,470 with an appreciative nod. “You have produced a book wch. will cause men to prick up what little has been lef
t them of ears—& to elevate their eyebrows.… it cannot fail, I think, to be much read.”73 For all his misgivings, he was grateful to have this valuable author within his doors. Although other publishing houses were capitalising on the increasingly lucrative evolutionary market, Murray retained the golden goose.
IX
On the face of it, 1871 was not auspicious for any of Darwin’s usual forms of strategic publicity. The Franco-Prussian War, then at its height, seemingly obliterated any prospect of European editions. Even so, he optimistically sent proof sheets to every overseas friend who had expressed a willingness to translate, admitting that “some delay may be advisable.”74
Astonishingly, in view of the political situation in Prussia, crushing defeats for France at Sedan and Metz, and especially during the “terrible year” of the siege of Paris and the dreadful events around the Commune, the Descent of Man went into Dutch, French, German, Russian, and Italian in 1871 and into Swedish, Polish, and Danish shortly thereafter, a testimony to the fortitude of Darwin’s colleagues and general interest in evolutionary affairs.