Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  As time went by, it seemed as though Darwin himself were a stately home or historic building briefly opened up for viewing. Henrietta and Richard Litchfield brought a party of Litchfield’s working men, accompanied by their wives, to Down on a Sunday excursion in 1873. Darwin greeted the throng with a few words and then left them to “an excellent tea on the lawn, wandering in the garden and singing under the lime-trees.”42 Accommodating these larger groups did not pass without a few troubled thoughts about burglars crossing Darwin’s mind. When sixty-seven vagabond boys came for an outing, his friend John Innes outlined for his edification the latest design in house alarm, with “fireworks” if needed.43 Even in the 1880s, when Darwin was an old man, parties of high-minded enthusiasts might descend at any moment. Leslie Stephen and his walking friends, “the Tramps,” recorded how they were entertained by Darwin at Down. On other outings these earnest young men made for John Tyndall at Hindhead and George Meredith at Box Hill.44 “Of all the eminent men that I have ever seen he is beyond comparison the most attractive to me. There is something almost pathetic in his simplicity and friendliness,” said Stephen.45

  Yet it cut both ways. Darwin and Emma found that they enjoyed easy access to the good and the great. Some visitors were too interesting or too eminent to miss. Moncure Conway, the unorthodox American minister with his own breakaway church in London, the South Place Religious Society, evidently appreciated Darwin’s writings and in 1873 preached a sermon entitled “The Pre-Darwinite and Post-Darwinite World.” Soon afterwards he was invited to a weekend party at Down House with Charles and Susan Norton, friends of Darwin’s who were over from Boston on a visit. It was probably on this occasion that Darwin gave Norton a copy of The Descent of Man inscribed in his own hand, “With the affectionate respect of the Author.”46

  The weekend was a great success. Conway was an excellent raconteur with a prodigious memory and had stories to tell about life in Cincinnati, his friendships with the Boston transcendentalists, his part in the abolitionist movement, and a heartbreaking tour he had made of the battlefields in Europe after the Franco-Prussian War. On arriving in England, he had persuaded Lyell and Pengelly to take him to Kent’s Cavern to look at extinct bones. “It has been my privilege to know the leading scientific men in America and Europe,” he said in his autobiography. “None of them was orthodox, and what could bigotry say against a tree that bore such fruits?”47

  Conway was prepared to admire Darwin. From his bedroom window he caught sight of his host wandering in the garden early one morning. “His grey head was bent to each bush as if bidding it good morning. And what a head!”48 Although he did not pursue the parallel, it would not be too fanciful to suggest that Conway saw in that early-morning tenderness something of the risen Christ, whom Mary mistook for a gardener.

  George Eliot was another catch. Delicately, Darwin put out social feelers to see if Emma and Henrietta might be introduced to her in 1873. They greatly admired her writings. The general disapproval surrounding Eliot’s unmarried life with George Henry Lewes was slowly lifting, and Darwin (who felt kindly towards Lewes, not least because of his encouraging remarks about pangenesis) had called at their London home on his own one Sunday in 1868. In March 1873 he attended one of Eliot and Lewes’s Sunday gatherings of literati. At that point he asked if he might bring Emma and the Litchfields. “My wife complains that she has been very badly treated and that I ought to have asked permission for her to call on you with me when we next come to London; but I tell her I have some shreds of modesty” (by which he meant embarrassment at openly requesting an invitation).

  Eliot responded the next morning. She was used to this kind of personal sightseeing.

  We shall be very happy to see Mr. and Mrs. Litchfield on any Sunday when it is convenient to them to come to us. Our hours of reception are from 1/2 past two till six, & the earlier our friends can come to us, the more fully we are able to enjoy conversation with them. Please do not disappoint us in the hope that you will come to us again, & bring Mrs. Darwin with you, the next time you are in town.49

  She signed herself M. E. Lewes. Henrietta and Richard Litchfield attended a party later that spring. Emma met her some while afterwards, during a visit to Erasmus’s house.

  V

  The other side of the celebrity coin was that people also wanted to know what he thought. People wrote for his autograph or asked him to describe his theories in his own hand. Rafts of amateur naturalists supplied snippets of information on topics that must have stopped even Darwin in his tracks—a frog inside a lump of coal, a hen that laid eggs with clock faces on them, a hybrid cat-rabbit, beans that grew on the wrong side of the pod in leap years, an avowal that the human soul was really only magnetism. “Dear Sir,” one letter began. “I suppose, that you have been very much astonished to receive some months ago a small box from Germany with different fruits of oranges, a specimen of wine and a sort of beans without any letter.”50 But there was little that could astonish Darwin now. Requests for money, jobs, testimonials, photographs, his support for elections to clubs and societies, and the supply of free copies of his books arrived in the post every morning.

  If none of these, it was clear that Darwin’s correspondents had read his books and found in them people just like themselves who had supplied information. They wished to join in, to participate in the build-up of evidence by reporting their own case histories; and perhaps to make a contribution, however small, to knowledge.

  In the decade that followed The Descent of Man, Darwin probably wrote around fifteen hundred letters each year and received much the same number in reply. Many of these letters are now missing, particularly those of a routine nature.51 Only 672 letters survive for the year 1872, and 420 for the year 1876, for example—and these were probably saved because they included useful information for his scientific work. According to Francis Darwin, his father would keep all incoming letters for a period of six or seven years, saying that he never knew when one or another might be useful for an address, and then periodically burn the entire folder when he needed an empty box to start the process over.52 Nonetheless Darwin paid out the relatively large sums of £37 8s. 6d in 1872 and £38 4s. 11d in 1876 for “stationery, stamps & newspapers,” about the same as he paid for “fish and game.”53 At a standard charge of Id for a penny postage stamp, and 240 pennies in every old pound, Darwin had a substantial undertaking on the go.

  Francis Darwin confirmed that his father spent several hours every day dealing with his correspondence. “At 9.30 a.m. he came into the drawing-room for his letters—rejoicing if the post was a light one and being sometimes much worried if it was not. He would then hear any family letters read aloud as he lay on the sofa. The reading aloud, which also included part of a novel, lasted till about half-past ten, when he went back to work till twelve or a quarter past.”54 A number of advertisements and circulars would arrive in the post too, continued Francis, and Darwin would “carry them back to the study having a sort of pride in filling his waste paper basket.” Time for writing replies came after lunch and would end at around three in the afternoon. All this suggests that some four or five letters must have left Down House every day.

  In the main, Darwin treated correspondents with patience, answering what probably sometimes appeared to him as fatuous questions. One of the few times he showed obvious irritation was in 1880 when Robert Lawson Tait suggested holding a Darwin festival in Birmingham. Tait was a pushy surgeon who constantly asked for favours. “Would it not be better to wait until I am in my grave?” Darwin sharply replied to the proposed festival.55 Critical comments seemingly arrived by the sackful too, until Darwin wrung his hands. “I should like a society formed so that every one might receive pleasant letters and never answer them,” he cried to Huxley.56

  The logistics of the undertaking were considerable, and on several occasions Darwin toyed with the idea of following Lyell’s example and employing a secretary. Lyell’s secretary, Arabella Buckley, was a loyal friend to the geologist. Sh
e later published natural history works of her own. Darwin was consequently tempted by a proposition put by an anonymous “Miss I.” Emma wrote on his behalf to state that “he says he will be glad to experiment for a month.” Nothing came of it. Next, he discovered that Wallace was experiencing financial difficulties and wondered if he could—if he should—hire him to edit the second edition of The Descent of Man. Wallace was so hard up that he secretly assisted Lyell for five shillings an hour. In the end, Darwin paid his son George to edit Descent (Henrietta was ill).

  Then Francis Darwin offered to help with the workload, “promising to be as civil as he could wish.” Darwin was reluctant to relinquish the task. “When he did let me,” recalled Francis, “he used always to say I did the civility well.”57 However, in 1874, Darwin capitulated and employed Francis as his secretary and assistant. Francis liked to describe the moment when Darwin realised he needed assistance. Someone sent him a volume called the Ingoldsby Letters dealing with the revision of the Book of Common Prayer, and in acknowledging it Darwin mentioned that his sons often laughed over the book—meaning R. H. Barham’s irreverently comic Ingoldsby Legends. That same year Francis married Amy Ruck, the daughter of a family friend from Wales, and came to live in a house in Downe village. Francis walked up the road every day to aid his father with botanical experiments and reply to correspondents. It seems not to have occurred to Francis that Darwin was giving him employment to compensate for his failure to pursue the medical profession for which he was trained.

  Darwin’s position in the world was becoming big business. With Francis’s encouragement he ordered some pre-printed correspondence cards that could be used as a response, especially if a signed carte de visite was also slipped into the envelope. Despite this convenience, Francis said that his father scarcely used the printed cards, since he felt anxious if he did not provide a proper handwritten reply. At some point, no doubt with an eye on his duties, Darwin also ordered a rubber stamp of his signature. It was apparently well used. (It survives today, stained with ink, serving as a reminder to autograph hunters that all may not be as it seems.)

  His life was carried on through these letters, as was his habit. Sometimes interesting old acquaintances would reappear in an envelope. Thomas Burgess, a long-forgotten shipmate from the Beagle, wrote to him in 1875 for a memento. Burgess had been one of the Royal Marines attached to the Beagle, and judging from the phonetic spelling, his letter was probably dictated to a poor scribe. He conjured up a time when Darwin’s life was energetic and uncomplicated.

  I have often times thought that I should very much like your Portrait as a remembrance of respect during the time I was on Board the Beagle, when she was surveying the South West Coast of Chili and Peru, commanded by Captian Fitzroy, for four years, and you was in connection with the survey on board the Beagle the whole time. For instance, do you remember me calling you upon Deck one night, when the Beagle Lay in Chilomay, to witness, the volcanic eruption of a mountain when I was on duty on the Middle Watch, and you exclaimed, O my God, what a sight, I shall never forget. Another instance, when whe walked eleven miles from the River Santa Cruz, and returning Back, you had forgot your compass and we had to make our way Back without them. Also, do you remember me giving you my water on our returning to the vessel when you was exausted with thirst. I hope I may have said sufficient as to convince you that I am not an imposter,—But one that wishes to have in remembrance of those Happy days I spent with you on Board the Beagle, that his, the presence of your Portrait. I trust you will not think me presumtious in asking for the small favour of respect, Because, I can assure you, I ask from the purest motives.58

  Messages from the past encouraged Darwin to make his own inquiries about long-lost friends. In 1872 he contacted Sarah Owen from the old Shropshire days, now a widow twice over and apparently living in London. Sarah’s younger sister, Fanny, had been Darwin’s first love. “No scenes in my whole life pass so frequently or so vividly before my mind as those which relate to happy old days at Woodhouse,” he wrote to Sarah sentimentally, forwarding a copy of his Expression.

  Sarah responded in a long and friendly letter that pleased him. He replied and called her Sarah (“you see how audaciously I begin”) as if she were a sister, or a wife. He kept up the correspondence until they ultimately met at Erasmus’s house in 1880. The fascination of things that might have been was strong. “Perhaps you would like to see a photograph of me now that I am old,” he hesitantly asked.

  Most of all, people inquired about his religious views. By now he had privately dispensed with the ambiguities that coloured his writing of the Origin of Species. He felt decisive—these were the most godless years of his life. No doubt his imagined grievance about Mivart’s behaviour, and the way he still over-reacted to the Athenaeum’s constant aggression, soured his perception of religiosity. Yet he also welcomed the gathering pace of change and the first landmarks of a new intellectual topography in which individuals felt able to express varieties of disbelief, a topography which his own book had done so much to open to view. He answered inquiries about his personal faith with a brisk affirmation of his inability to believe, using Huxley’s term “agnostic” wherever appropriate. Sometimes sad, sometimes steely, sometimes stately, he told correspondents that on this issue he could not trust the evidence of his own reason because mankind was little more than an elevated monkey. “I can never make up my mind how far an inward conviction that there must be some Creator or First Cause is really trustworthy evidence,” he observed to Francis Abbot, a liberal American clergyman and religious writer. The whole concept of the divine was “beyond the scope of man’s intellect.”

  Characteristically, he avoided public statements to this effect, although he fell into a stimulating correspondence with Abbot, the editor of a freethinking journal, the Index. Abbot first contacted him in 1871 wondering if Darwin might supply a few remarks on religion that could be used in a public lecture. Darwin replied promptly and honestly, “I do not feel I have thought deeply enough to justify any publicity.” A few months later, Abbot published in the Index a clear-headed account of contemporary religious belief (“latitudinarians” were “platitudinarians”) that included comments on Darwin’s and Tylor’s impact on modern thought. He followed this by printing, in an editorial, part of a letter from Darwin under the heading “The coming empire of science: a letter from Mr. Darwin.” Darwin was sufficiently interested to subscribe to the Index for a number of years. Abbot was a friend of Charles Eliot Norton’s, and both were founder members of the Free Religious Association, which owned and published this journal. The association wished to encourage rational humanism, invoking “Truth, Freedom, Progress, Equal Rights, and Brotherly Love.”

  What Darwin would not do publicly he was sometimes prepared to do privately. When Abbot sent him a copy of his pamphlet Truths for the Times (1872), Darwin allowed Abbot to print a recommendation for the book in the Index, in which he warmly endorsed Abbot’s principles, saying, “I admire them from my inmost heart & agree to almost every word.” Abbot was highly gratified. Somewhat at a loss as to what he could offer in return, he gave Darwin a free subscription.

  It was my intention to continue sending the paper indefinitely: for you have paid for it many times over by your kind permission to use your expression concerning the “Truths for the Times.” This has been worth a great deal to me; and I cannot tell you how delighted I was by your letter of January 8th, saying that you were pleased with the manner in which I had introduced your name. I can never without deep gratitude remember your generosity to me in this matter.59

  Darwin evidently kept Abbot’s interests at heart. Some time later, during one of those difficult moments that small-circulation, specialist periodicals usually encounter, Darwin sent Abbot a gift of £25. Judging from the comments scribbled in the margins of his copies, he paid attention to the serious-minded articles that Abbot published, especially in 1874, when there was a long discussion of the moral philosophy emerging from The Express
ion of the Emotions and The Descent of Man. Darwin wrote to say that although he had “no practice in following abstract and abstruse reasoning,” and that he could not see how morality could be “objective and universal,” he felt the eulogy was “magnificent.”60 Inexplicably, in 1880 he had William write to request the withdrawal of his endorsement for Truths for the Times.

  Along with religious probings came questions about the first beginnings of life. Darwin was often asked his opinion about this, and in 1871 had felt moved to write to Hooker on the subject in a more reflective vein than usual.

  It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine [sic] compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.61

  In other words, even though life might have originated in chains of active proteins, if these simple chains of organic matter were generated today, they would be destroyed before they had a chance to evolve into anything. As Darwin expressed it, that warm little pond was not entirely a fantasy. To him the origin of life was probably a historical phenomenon, unrepeatable, and unrepeated—a direct rebuttal of Lamarck and Pouchet’s proposal that spontaneous generation was still continuing in the modern period.

  But he remained silent. Ever since Louis Pasteur and Charles Pouchet’s argument over the presence of simple organisms in apparently sterile solutions, and his own outburst against Owen’s “slime, snot or protoplasm,” in the Athenaeum, he had of course followed the literature, sometimes for, sometimes against. His own theory of evolution would stand to gain if spontaneous generation was shown to be possible—it would acquire its necessary starting point. Yet it was easy to make rash mistakes. He made this plain to Anton Dohrn, saying that “caution [is] almost the soul of science.”