Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  Darwin then went a step further. When he obtained Duchenne’s album, possibly a personal gift from Duchenne (with whom he corresponded in 1871), he showed several of the photographs to people of various ages and sexes to find out what emotion they thought was being expressed. As he hoped, most of the expressions were identified and described in more or less the same terms. Fear, anger, and sorrow were immediately spotted, a point that Darwin would mention in his book to vindicate his opinion that some expressions were universal, recognised the world over. Other photographs were more perplexing. Duchenne’s picture of an electrically induced smile confused almost all of Darwin’s helpers, most of whom identified the expression as unnatural, possibly malicious. A genuine smile from the same patient was easily recognised as such. Darwin reproduced several of these pictures in Expression but not before having his printers mask the galvanic probes in all but one illustration (a photograph of simulated mental distress).

  From this and other instances of confusion or misidentification Darwin drew valuable conclusions. The human eye was very discerning, even quixotic. He showed an old picture of religious ecstasy to his cousin Hensleigh and recorded that “Hensleigh W. thinks one side more seraphic than the other.”120 His survey revealed that people recognised expressions only if all the muscular details were exactly right—without crinkled eyelids, a laughing mouth meant nothing. So the eye learns to read faces and stumbles over errors in their syntax.121

  Fascinated, he hunted out Dr. James Crichton-Browne at Wakefield Asylum, in Yorkshire, for access to photographic records of asylum inmates. Darwin thought that the insane would probably have little control over their mental processes and hence display emotions in a clear, uncomplicated way. By matching the patients’ faces to their medical records he could inquire into human rationality and consciousness, issues he had left relatively untouched in The Descent of Man. He wondered how consciousness might relate to the emergence of what he called “civilised” behaviour. Was rationality lost by the insane in the same way as it was presumed to be gained by early societies?

  James Crichton-Browne was one of the most distinguished psychiatrists of the later nineteenth century, admired for his work on neurological pathology and the classification of mental disorders. Like many of his contemporaries, Crichton-Browne believed there were characteristic “faces” of madness, and, as a keen photographer, he photographed (or arranged to have photographed) all his inmates, labelling each image with the patient’s medical diagnosis, invariably one of the “manias” that formed an integral part of Victorian psychiatric classification. Crichton-Browne labelled and sent forty or more photographs of otherwise unidentified asylum patients to Down House, and discussed these and many other points about facial expression with Darwin in letters. His input helped Darwin enormously. “I have been making immense use almost every day of your manuscript,” Darwin claimed extravagantly.122 Tactfully, Darwin did not reproduce any of these psychiatric photographs in his volume except for a single woodcut of a woman’s hair bristling like an angry animal. And he made sure to consult other knowledgeable asylum-keepers, such as Patrick Nicol at the Sussex Lunatic Asylum in Haywards Heath. While he hesitated to link mentally disturbed patients directly with primitives, children, or subhuman groups on the evolutionary scale, there can be no denying that he regarded mental activity in all its manifestations as a sure route for mapping the distinguishing biological traits of humanity and the development of nations.

  Most usefully of all, Darwin established contact with Oscar Rejlander, the art photographer from Sweden who opened studios in Wolverhampton and then in London, and whose genre studies were appreciated by Prince Albert, Julia Cameron, and Charles Dodgson. This lucky contact lifted Darwin’s researches well out of the ordinary and set a precedent for decades of investigation to come. Rejlander’s breezy and engaging personality, his enthusiasm for stimulating new projects, and his passion for expressive photography were just the thing to catch Darwin’s attention. Irrepressibly, Rejlander threw himself into assisting Darwin in this scientific project.

  Rejlander tended to specialise in child character studies. His Perception, The Young Philosopher, and Early Contemplation were considered uniquely expressive by those in search of unambiguous moral meaning (though overly emphatic for modern taste), and his images of grimy street urchins and a vast composite photograph exhibited in 1857 called The Two Ways of Life brought him a degree of fame. Voluble, comically theatrical in his behaviour, and wildly gesticulating, Rejlander would cajole or tease his models until the expression he sought blossomed naturally. The technical difficulties of capturing these in photographs were formidable. Money was always short.

  It was Rejlander’s genre picture of a vigorously screaming baby that alerted Darwin. This photograph was dubbed Ginx’s Baby after the title of a popular novel published in 1870 by John Edward Jenkins. In the book the baby interrupted every juncture with screams and yells.123 Rejlander objected, but the name stuck and soon he was innundated with requests for copies. Sixty thousand prints and 250,000 cartes de visite were produced. As he acknowledged, it was not high art but it paid the bills.124 He hardly liked to say that he had extensively manipulated the image, first of all retouching it, then copying it by hand in chalk in order to rephotograph the chalk drawing alone.125 It was the rephotographed image that Darwin saw.

  To Darwin’s eyes, this picture exactly illustrated the information about babies’ faces he had tried to elicit from his women friends. He was convinced that very young children cried without tears, and that the characteristic expression of grief gave a square outline to the mouth and created furrows in the cheeks. All he needed was a photograph to demonstrate the point. He approached Rejlander to ask if he could reproduce Ginx’s Baby in Expression. Over the weeks that followed, Rejlander supplied him with a number of other pictures of expressions in children and adults.

  The best of it was that Rejlander volunteered to pose himself. Clad in a bohemian dark velvet costume, he struck histrionic attitudes—grief, pleasure, disgust, and so on—and either photographed himself with a time-lapse device or got his wife to aid him. The resulting pictures depended as much on comically exaggerated gesture and body position as on facial expression. On the back of one picture he scribbled in pencil, “My wife insists upon me sending this for you, that your ladies may see that I can put on a more amiable expression.” Rejlander’s wife posed for a photograph of a sneer (Darwin thought that sneering evolved from the expression of disgust). Gamely, she allowed herself to be reproduced thus in Darwin’s volume.

  These photographs suited Darwin’s purpose. He visited Rejlander in his London studio and maintained friendly contact with him for several years afterwards, glad enough to get him to photograph Polly the dog for Expression (reproduced as a line drawing), and personally sitting to Rejlander for a portrait photograph in 1871 that was afterwards reproduced as a line engraving in several magazines. He may have sat to Rejlander again in 1874 when he recorded paying two guineas for a photograph from him. That same year Darwin gave Rejlander a gift of £10 to bolster his declining business—though to little effect.126 Rejlander died in near penury in 1875.

  For all his entertaining histrionics, Rejlander pushed one line of research further than Darwin envisaged. When he learned that Darwin was finding it hard to pinpoint the minute physical differences between laughter and crying—the visual signs were difficult to distinguish—he set about photographing himself sitting next to an enlargement of Ginx’s Baby, first emulating laughter and then sadness. Using composite techniques, Rejlander printed the two photographs on a single plate for comparison. He had done similar tricks many times before, both as a private joke, in one of which he appeared twice, introducing himself to himself, or in his large composite photograph Two Ways of Life.127 On the back he explained, “Fun only—Here I laughed—ha, ha, ha, violently. In the other I cried e e e. Yet how similar the expression.”128 Darwin found the comparison useful and kept the photograph safely in his collection,
perhaps the only copy made and certainly the only one to survive.

  “I must have the pleasure of expressing my obligations to Mr. Rejlander for the trouble which he has taken in photographing for me various expressions and gestures,” Darwin generously reported in the eventual book.

  XIII

  The volume was called On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals and was published in November 1872. Ill again, Darwin had to push himself hard to get it written. “I have had a poor time of it of late: rarely having an hour of comfort, except when asleep or immersed in work; & then when that is over I feel dead with fatigue,” he told Wallace. “I am now correcting my little book on Expression; but it will not be published till November, when of course a copy will be sent to you. I shall now try whether I can occupy myself, without writing anything more on so difficult a subject, as evolution.”129

  It turned out the most successful and readable book he had produced up to that point, selling some nine thousand copies in the first four months, many more than the Origin of Species had done in a similar span. “I don’t think it is a book to affront anybody,” said Emma with obvious satisfaction. “I think it will be generally interesting.”

  One contributory factor was surely that Darwin included illustrations. The book was notable for presenting some of the first mechanically reproduced photographs of the period as well as a number of line drawings by the zoological illustrators Josef Wolf, Briton Rivière, and Thomas Wood. These helped the book’s general interest and popular appeal. Photographic reproductions of Ginx’s Baby joined pictures of Duchenne’s electrified middle-aged man, sulky children, and a number of domestic cats and dogs in action. The illustrations graphically conveyed Darwin’s point. Yet even while generating the appearance of technical excellence they had given him untold trouble. Before publication most of the pictures had to be enhanced by hand, or simulated in some way, to show what Darwin required. “The hair is generally smooth on the loins, & this makes the roughness on the back & neck more apparent,” he commented on Wolf’s drawing of an angry dog. His letters to the artists, in which he naggingly asked for tiny details to be changed, revealed much about the theory of emotional expression that he was trying to establish.

  Notwithstanding Emma’s comment, Darwin regarded the book as a crucial part of his lifelong evolutionary project. The subject of expression brought his anthropological cycle to a conclusion, seeking to demonstrate a continuum between the mental life of humans and animals. In it, Darwin accepted the commonsensical view that facial expressions and bodily gestures were a primary indication of internal emotional states—that they were the innate and uncontrollable manifestation of what was going on inside. Pain was accompanied by a grimace. Pleasure was accompanied by a smile. Darwin suggested that such expressions must have arisen through the same evolutionary mechanisms throughout the human and animal kingdom. The expressions that pass over human faces were, to him, a daily, living proof of animal ancestry.

  Furthermore, in Expression he proposed that some habits and learned behaviours could, if advantageous to an animal, be preserved and eventually rendered innate. Gazing into the heart of his original hypothesis of adaptation by natural selection he discovered he must partly concede the environmentalist point in respect to behaviour.130 Behaviour and biology were inextricably interwoven in ways that natural selection—the anvil on which he tested every theory—was insufficient to explain. Quietly, and without any fanfare, Darwin modified his views, accepting that the inheritance of acquired characteristics needed to be part of his system.

  Robert Cooke, the new manager at John Murray’s, provided an oasis of calm before publication. He anticipated large sales and was not disappointed. “It may be advisable to get police to defend the house,” Cooke sportively declared on 25 November 1872. Murray was astonished. “Your modesty about Expression misled me to underestimate its sale.”

  Darwin was content. His series of evolutionary works was complete. Within the week, the magazine Fun issued a cartoon in which a well-dressed, buxom young lady was clasped at the wrist by an apish-looking Darwin who was taking her pulse. “Really, Mr. Darwin,” she exclaimed, “say what you like about Man; but I wish you would leave my emotions alone!”

  chapter

  10

  DARWIN IN THE DRAWING ROOM

  URING the 1870s, Darwin became the most famous naturalist in the country, “first among the scientific men of England,” as Edward Aveling put it, his name inextricably linked with the idea of evolution and with the larger shifts in public opinion gathering pace as the century drew toward a close.1 In truth he was a reluctant hero, eager to puncture any inflated estimation of his worth among his friends and family. His fame often teetered on the edge of notoriety, as he was nervously aware. Yet he understood that the tide of change carried him along on the unstoppable crest of a wave. His face and his name were becoming known far beyond the confines of academic discussion. The term “Darwinism,” almost by default, covered all kinds of evolutionism and unfairly eclipsed the work of Huxley, Wallace, and others. Even his own book was now apparently more discussed than read. “It has been so easy to learn something of the Darwinian theory at second-hand, that few have cared to study it as expounded by its author,” Wallace said accurately enough after Darwin’s death.2 Slowly, and somewhat uncomfortably, Darwin recognised that this celebrity, however much he disliked it, worked to his theory’s advantage.

  As might be expected in an era dedicated to the cultivation of national heroes and heroines, much of Darwin’s personal prominence was expressed in characteristically Victorian form. Byron, Dickens, the Duke of Wellington, David Livingstone, and Jenny Lind: all these had risen to fame on the back of escalating expectations of what it might mean to be a celebrity. The notion of evolution by natural selection was, for example, unusual in the way it became part of the richly varied world of nineteenth-century popular culture. Few lay people had direct access to science or scientists, after all. Instead they might encounter scientific knowledge through general nonscientific media like books and magazines, sometimes in a law court or a doctor’s surgery, or through pictures, biographies, advertisements, and newspapers. There were plenty of sites for the production and consumption of popular science, too, where evolutionary concepts could also take root, such as natural history museums, horticultural exhibitions, menageries, freak shows, art galleries, agricultural contests, music halls, and fashionable crazes that involved the human psyche like mesmerism.3

  As far as Darwin was concerned, the dramatic rise in consumer culture had a particular material effect. Although Darwin never encountered his own face on a biscuit tin, as Queen Victoria did, or knowingly allowed his name to endorse household products such as soap or snuff, he did find himself and his theory transformed into various types of commodity. Those people who were conscious of the changing times could, if they wished, buy a pottery statuette of a monkey contemplating a human skull.4 They might pay to gape at William Henry Johnson, the living “Man-Monkey,” at Leicester Square.5 They could commission an elegant piece of Wedgwood ware decorated by Émile Lessore with cherubs clustering around the tree of life, hang a Darwinian caricature from Punch on their walls, sing a duet at the piano on the “Darwinian Theory,” read edifying popular romances such as Survival of the Fittest or The Lancashire Wedding, or Darwin Moralized, or give their children nursery primers called What Mr. Darwin Saw.6 One freethinking daily almanack produced in 1874 included quotations from Darwin’s books in its printed thoughts for each day. Moving abroad, beyond the English coastline, Spanish gourmets could drink a glass of anise from a bottle illustrated with a Darwinian imp. “Science says it is the best—and that’s the truth,” declared the label.7 And farmers in upstate New York could medicate their livestock under Darwin’s unseeing gaze. The agricultural firm of G. W. Merchant, of Lockport, near Rochester, advertised its gargling oil with a pictorial ape that sang:

  If I am Darwin’s Grandpa,

  It follows, don’t you see,
>
  That what is good for man & beast

  Is doubly good for me.8

  These diverse commercial products made Darwin and his intellectual achievement tangible to his own generation and the ones that followed him.

  For a man like Darwin, fame would, however, take some getting used to. He was a reticent soul, uneasy with anything that demanded public appearance and—while appreciative of approbation from his scientific colleagues—was troubled by the notion of dancing to more popular tunes. Scientists had rarely been figures of interest before. More than this, he did not like the idea of people recognising him or knowing things about him without his knowing them. Public and private become highly problematic categories for society’s most conspicuous individuals, as has long been recognised from other celebrity studies. So it was perhaps a relief to him that these first stirrings of celebrity took place in a context where his literal presence was not desired. The books and magazines that ran articles about him, and the evolutionary souvenirs and caricatures that appeared in the marketplace were relatively abstract phenomena, dissociated from his private life, and for that very reason enterprises with which he could, to some degree, engage. He felt relatively comfortable—and far less emotionally exposed—in the familiar world of print, pictures, and objects.