by Janet Browne
And yet it was not clear how a scientific man like Darwin might be represented in such a world. Science on the whole possessed few commonly accepted stereotypes. The subject matter of science at that time was esoteric, often quite distinct from commonsensical notions based in ordinary experience, and then hovering on the brink of shifting from well-known conventional institutional settings like the university lecture room to the more modern spaces of laboratory or clinic. If scientists were to be depicted in public, say in the Illustrated London News, it was unclear what might constitute appropriate visual symbols for their activities or what might be the best way to indicate the inner life of the mind. The stereotypes that would come to dominate future images of science and its practitioners—the complicated mechanical equipment lurking in the background, the microscope, white coat, and laboratory bench—did not as yet carry unanimous weight. Such devices would become known only with the growth of science itself accompanied by simpler photography and cheaper means of mass-media reproduction and circulation.9
As Darwin rose to fame, cultural commentators therefore came to portray him in books and pictures in more familiar Victorian guises—sometimes as a traveller, collector, or naturalist. Given his life story, it was appropriate to portray Darwin as an explorer, both literally, as in his travels on the Beagle, and metaphorically as a man who brought detached, objective vision to new terrains of knowledge. Geographical explorers were given an especially privileged position as truth-tellers in nineteenth-century Britain, not least because they had seen with their own eyes, and Darwin’s work was occasionally represented in books and articles as if it were a geographical discovery on the same scale as uncovering the source of the Nile.10 Darwin found that he could slip effortlessly into this frame of reference, willing to think of his life as a voyage of discovery, one that was initiated by his real voyage, and casting his future autobiography and, in places, the Origin of Species in much the same mould. “I have always felt that I owe to the voyage the first real training or education of my mind.… Everything about which I thought or read was made to bear directly on what I had seen and was likely to see; and this habit of mind was continued during the five years of the voyage. I feel sure that it was this training which has enabled me to do whatever I have done in science.”11 And it was easy to depict Darwin as a natural history collector, absorbed in the minutiae of nature, building up his achievement specimen by specimen.
But it was as an ape that Darwin was most usually represented—a wonderfully apt and flexible visual imagery that played on the central theme of his writings and marked his passage into the common context of Victorian popular culture.
II
Evolutionary theory proved an irresistible subject for caricaturists. Of course, caricatures and cartoons in general already supplied Victorians with their sharpest and most developed form of satire, a special form of comment that sanctioned savage public attacks on people in the news, the politicians, royalty, gentry, and social butterflies of the day, combining ridicule, exaggeration, bawdiness, sententiousness, and the deliberate distortion of facts to lampoon victims without mercy. Much of the humour was broad. Much emerged from a puritanical moralism that hated pretension and delighted in exposing what others tried to hide. These comic cuts gave nineteenth-century satirists a lens through which to mirror the times back to contemporary opinion, as had indeed been the case in Britain since the caustic wit of James Gillray had responded to the turbulent years of George III and the American and French revolutions.12 So it is not too surprising that Victorian satirists leaped on the idea of animal ancestry and evolution as a topical vehicle for commenting on the nation’s preoccupations. Moreover, satirical skits about apes fell helter-skelter into the long tradition of identifying animal traits in human beings and puncturing intellectual pretensions the world over. Age-old tropes of metamorphosis and the existence of the beast beneath the human surface—standard topics for political comment—were given fresh meaning that reflected the concerns of the age.
Even so, there was something special about the vigorous combination of advanced pictorial technologies, widening readerships, loosening cultural boundaries, and the publication of The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions that prompted satirists in the early 1870s to produce an abundant variety of parodies, cartoons, verses, and humorous sketches relating to the general theme of evolutionary progression.
Visual images took centre stage. In Britain, in the era of cheap illustrated magazines like the Comic Almanack (founded 1835), Punch (1841), Comic Times (1850), Fun (1861), Judy (1867), and Figaro (1870), cartoonists danced eagerly with the idea of physical transformation, single-mindedly endorsing staple symbolic types that would last well into the twentieth century, turning politicians into unpleasant animals or converting John Bull, the reactionary national icon, into a leg of roast beef, the national dish. Most of these images drew on well-established prejudices that antedated Darwin’s writings, sometimes by centuries, and much of their impact rested in these multiple allusions. Evolution in this form meshed comprehensively with contemporary biases, embracing anti-intellectualism, imperialism, slavery, class, race, colour, and political identity, for Darwinism could easily reinforce crude stereotypes and bigotry against Negroes, aborigines, women, Jews, servants, and the Irish.13 Nevertheless, each artist could only select his subject matter from a repertoire of available topics and print technologies. It was a measure of the publicity accompanying evolutionary writings that they should choose to frame some of their most trenchant observations in terms of Darwin’s theory. Outside Britain, talented caricaturists like “Andre Gill” in La Charivari (1832), Wilhelm Busch in Fliegende Blatter (1844), and Thomas Nast in Harper’s Weekly (1851), the last memorably documenting the Civil War and etching the elephant and donkey symbols into the American mind, purveyed evolutionism and Darwin along with the ironies of their own culture. In a world of slick and unconstrained popularisation, caricatures and satires about evolutionary theory were a highly usable resource.
Some twenty or thirty printed caricatures about evolutionary theory were produced in Britain from 1865 to 1882, roughly the last two decades of Darwin’s lifetime, many more than those of any comparable scientific theory, although, it should be said, not nearly as many as pertained to conspicuous national figures like Disraeli or Gladstone. In particular, the magazine Punch, which developed an enduring relationship with Darwinian theory, paid more attention in the long run to Disraeli, chronicling his ascendancy with indulgent contempt, or to the Irish, the last being a specially vehement target during the years of debate over Home Rule. Few of these Punch drawings revealed the ferocious bite of earlier artists such as Hogarth, Gillray, or Rowlandson. Nor did they exhibit the cut and thrust of Honoré Daumier in Paris or the patriotic fervour of Thomas Nast, each of whom set out to expose public hypocrisy.14 The days of vicious campaigning satire had gone—in Mr. Punch’s hands at least.15
An altogether milder form of topical comment was apparent in British illustrated magazines. This form of attenuated cartoon, in fact, had developed in Britain in 1843 with John Leech’s drawings in Punch, and was quickly picked up in pictorial journals like Richard Bentley’s Miscellany, the Cornhill, and Good Words, and especially in mass-circulation editions of novels, the new commercial phenomenon only made possible by advancing print technologies and best seen in Dickens’s works as illustrated by George Cruikshank and Hablot Browne (Phiz). These were domesticated drawings, relying on familiar middle-class values, droll rather than cruel. In the capable hands of John Doyle (“HB”) and his son Richard Doyle, followed by those of Sir John Tenniel, Edward Linley Samborne, Ernest Griset, and Charles Keene, cartoons in Punch and Fun came to express the thoughts of conventionally minded members of the public when faced with the absurdities of modern life. “So you see Mary, baby is descended from a hairy quadruped, with pointed ears and a tail. We all are!” said Jack, in Punch, having been reading his wife passages from The Descent of Man.
“Speak fo
r yourself Jack! I’m not descended from anything of the kind, I beg to say,” retorted Mary. “And baby takes after me, so there!”16
Punch artists aimed precisely at those readers who would most easily decode and approve its messages. Under the general direction of Shirley Brooks, editor from 1870, and then the humorist Tom Taylor from 1874, their drawings showed well-behaved middle-class men and women like Jack and Mary discussing hairy ancestors beside the fire or attending evening soirées conducted by “Dr. Fossil.” They dressed apes as gentlemen or put Darwin in God’s celestial chair. None of these images were as shocking or as subversive as they might have been in Paris or Berlin. In a word, Punch and Fun cartoons mirrored the broad-minded, lazy acquiescence that characterised the complacent, prosperous classes of Britain. With only a few passing grimaces at the follies of science, these pictures softened at least some of the anxieties inherent in evolution by turning them into drawing-room trifles.17 Punch satirists were perhaps creating a new structure of consensus.
So these British cartoons seemingly spoke with the voice of the establishment rather than as its scourge. “At the sight of a monkey scratching himself in the Zoological Gardens, the philosopher might with much propriety observe, ‘There but for Natural Selection and the Struggle for Existence sits Charles Darwin,’ ” said Punch prosaically. When Princess Louise, the oldest daughter of Queen Victoria, married the Marquis of Lorne in 1874, Fun parodied the wedding procession by including, among the trumpeters and royal guests, the figures of “Dr. Darwin and our distinguished ancestor.” In that cartoon, Darwin escorted an ape down the aisle. An earlier representation of Darwin previously appeared in 1871 in the pages of the London edition of Figaro, in which Darwin politely invited an ape to contemplate its future in a hand mirror, supported by appropriate quotations from Shakespeare. Marriage, royalty, and Shakespeare could hardly have been more acceptable vehicles for comment. By endorsing the traditional verities of British life, these humorists gave Darwin’s theory a relatively unthreatening place in Victorian homes—or at least depicted science as a folly pursued by others and about which respectable men and women need not overly concern themselves.
One significant feature of late-nineteenth-century evolutionary caricatures is the frequency with which Darwin appears in them as the ape itself. His personal facial attributes, such as his beard, the great dome of his skull, and the hairy, beetling eyebrows, were becoming known to the middling sector of society through portrait woodcuts and line engravings reproduced from photographs in the Illustrated London News from 1871 onwards. Other pictures of Darwin were available in album-style publications like Representative Men of Literature, Science and Art (1868). The most well-known, however, was probably the Vanity Fair chromolithograph, published as “Men of the Day, No. 33. Natural Selection” in September 1871, six months after the release of The Descent of Man. This Vanity Fair caricature was by Carlo Pellegrini under his customary byline of “Ape” (although the Darwin print was in fact unsigned) and was thought by Darwin’s relatives accurately to capture his elongated figure and characteristic posture. It belonged to one of Pellegrini’s series of character studies that embraced scientists, ecclesiastics, politicians, sportsmen, and other figures of note, each illustration accompanied by a jocular caption and, in the printed part of the magazine, a biographical résumé that invariably made fun of the superficial values of the day. Vanity Fair portraits of Huxley and Wilberforce, each squaring up to the other, had been a well-publicised pair a few years beforehand, and Richard Owen (“Old Bones”) and Herbert Spencer (“Philosophy”) were also in the series. These pictures were not intended to stand alone; they needed to be viewed with the text. They furthermore had an extended life as separate prints. The caricature of Darwin can sometimes be found with a different caption, “You know we all sprang from monkeys?” This variant exists in Darwin’s personal collection, and is accompanied by a matching caricature of Owen, retorting, “What a pity you didn’t spring a little further.” Pellegrini approached Darwin through John Murray for permission to go ahead with the caricature, a precautionary move rarely taken by other Victorian artists, and a practice not usually followed by Pellegrini himself.
Thus recognised, Darwin’s facial features were emphasised in every British caricature around the time of The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions, although to be sure there were one or two in which the artist clearly worked without such information. To some extent, too, the artists consciously played on the iconography of intellectuality. Most caricaturists, then or now, could call on conventional attributes of academic learning such as an absent-minded demeanour, a blackboard, gender, a pair of spectacles, baldness, and so on. “A little lecture by Professor D——n on the development of the Horse” showed Darwin, prolifically bearded, as an absent-minded professor in front of a blackboard, with a handkerchief tumbling out of his trouser pocket in imitation of a monkey’s tail. The joke lay in his laborious explanation of the evolution of a horseradish plant into a racehorse through ten nonsensical horsey stages, including a clothes-horse, Louis Quart-horse, and a Hors-de-combat. In 1871, when The Descent of Man was being reviewed in American journals, Thomas Nast drew for Harper’s Weekly a gorilla outside the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The gorilla protested to a recognisable picture of “Mr. Darwin” that his pedigree was being stolen.
Darwin’s beard—an eye-catching feature of the commercially reproduced portraits of him—was therefore a bonus for cartoonists. His general hairiness begged to be turned into animal fur. Add a tail, and there was an image that shrieked of apish or monkey ancestors (the general public was never too fussy about which). Artists at the Hornet churned out an image of Darwin as a “Venerable Orang-Outang: A contribution to Unnatural History” in March 1871, one month after Descent was published. Such a picture of Darwin-as-ape or Darwin-as-monkey readily identified him as the author of the theory in much the same way as a military longboot might have indicated the Duke of Wellington during the Napoleonic period. An undated letter in Darwin’s files (probably written in 1871) reflected the point exactly. “Will you permit me to address to you a few lines upon your elaborately evolved theory of man’s descent, or ascent (I should rather name it), from the lower creation,” asked a Mr. D. Thomas, presumably from Wales.
Now Sir do not be offended if I just tell you what struck me when I saw your likeness in the Illustrated News on Saturday & not myself only but others with whom I have spoken, the striking resemblance there is to an ape, the thick skull, deep set eyes & hairy face all remind one of a fine venerable old Ape & how striking that the person who is most bent upon linking the monkey race to us should so much resemble one in outward form.18
The evolutionary tree also began making an appearance in cartoons. After publication of The Descent of Man, Darwin was frequently depicted as a monkey swinging from a tree, sometimes labelled the “tree of life.” Punch caricaturists placed an ape in a tree diligently reading a copy of the Origin of Species. The magazine Figaro put a hairy Darwin among the branches of “A Darwinian hypothesis,” and the Parisian satirical journal La Petite Lune dangled him in the guise of a monkey from the “arbre de la science” with an elegant tail draped over his arm.
Few other scientific theories were so readily identifiable in the public prints of the day—perhaps only electricity and telegraphy, the main technological advances of the era, were to have comparable impact on the British public, and these were rarely connected in such an obvious manner to their human originators. A hairy, apish Darwin and a tree became easily recognisable images of evolution—perhaps as recognisable to Victorians as the double helix of DNA is to many people today.
This visual characterisation of trees had subtle but definite effect. Satirists could have called on a number of other possible evolutionary images. Charles Henry Bennett had drawn circular sequences of men changing into cooked geese and Christmas puddings in 1863 and labelled them Darwinian transformations, no doubt a joke on classical notions o
f metamorphosis and perhaps also on eighteenth-century physiognomic transformations between man and beast as discussed in Johann Caspar Lavater’s writings. Bennett, however, seems to have understood the sequence of evolution as a circle rather than as Darwin’s branching tree. Circularity as a motif came over just as strongly in Henry Woolf’s full-page cartoon in Harper’s Weekly in 1871 of “The Darwinian Student’s After-Dinner Dream,” in which knives and forks metamorphosed in stages into the pretty girl the student wishes to marry.19 Linley Sambourne afterwards portrayed a great spiral from “Chaos” to God’s throne in heaven, on which Darwin casually sprawled.20
Nineteenth-century satirists hardly ever depicted Wallace or Huxley in similar situations even though they were by far the most prominent men otherwise associated with the gorilla question. One cartoon in Fun included Huxley and Spencer (but not Wallace) in a critique of The Expression of the Emotions, showing the scientists cowering before an angry hippopotamus protecting her young. This played on the well-advertised birth of a baby hippo in the London Zoological Gardens a month or two before. The caption read, “An open countenance denotes a gentle and good-natured character.” Here and elsewhere, it seems as if Wallace was ignored and that it was Darwin’s books that were perceived as the primary texts in generating a wholesale transformation in thought. Caricaturists portrayed the theory of evolution as if it were Darwin’s alone. Indeed this interweaving of evolutionary imagery and portraits of Darwin probably contributed materially to the sense that evolutionism and Darwinism were one and the same thing.
As for the grizzled old ape himself, Darwin took a friendly interest in collecting the caricatures. “Ah, has Punch taken me up?” he said to one passing visitor to Down House, the geologist James Hague. Hague reported the rest of their conversation.