Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  VIII

  In August 1873 Darwin experienced what Emma called “a fit” in which he temporarily lost his memory and could not move. “Very unwell partial memory loss 12 hours, sinking fits,” she scribbled urgently in her diary. Frantically, she consulted Huxley and on his advice sent for Andrew Clark from London, renowned for his sensitive handling of nervous patients. Clark descended the very next day, and would not take a fee for his advice, although Emma wished otherwise. The verdict was reassuring: “there was a great deal of work in him yet.” Clark put Darwin on a strict diet, which seemed to work well enough for a while, and prescribed special pills, packed with strychnine and iodine. “Thank God,” the invalid sighed to Hooker. “I would far sooner die than lose my mind.”

  Otherwise, he felt fulfilled, not nearly so ill as usual. Leonard took a pleasant photograph the following year of his father seated in a wicker chair on the veranda, looking tired but benign. This veranda had been built in 1872 after a family holiday in a rented house near Sevenoaks where Emma and Darwin became “acquainted with the charm of outdoor living.” They returned to Down House full of architectural visions, going on to construct a wood-framed veranda along the garden frontage of the drawing room, roofed in glass and paved with colourful encaustic tiles. Emma installed cushioned benches for the boys and the armchair for her husband. “So much of all future life was carried on there, it is associated with such happy hours of talk and leisurely loitering, that it seems to us almost like a friend,” said Henrietta.

  The fine row of limes to the west sheltered it from the afternoon sun, and we heard the hum of bees and smelt the honey-sweet flowers as we sat there. The flower-beds and the dear old dial, by which in the old days my father regulated the clocks, were in front, and beyond the lawn the field stretching to the south. Polly, too, appreciated it and became a familiar sight, lying curled up on one of the red cushions basking in the sun. After my marriage she adopted my father and trotted after him wherever he went, lying on his sofa on her own rug during working-hours.77

  Francis recalled those days with similar affection. For him the veranda was redolent with sounds of summer.

  The veranda which was built onto the drawing room was his idea, and gave him much pleasure as he often sat there in his tall Japanese wicker chair shown in Leo’s photograph.—It was a pretty veranda with tessellated floor, and wooden posts covered with little Virginia Creeper, and with white clematis trained along the rafters and Adlumia grown from seed springing up in a big flower box in the corner & often decorated with big plants such as Vallota in pots.… One sound there was peculiar to Down—I mean the sound of drawing water. In that dry chalky country we depended for drinking-water on a deep well from which it came up cold and pure in buckets. These were raised by a wire rope on a spindle turned by a heavy fly-wheel, and it was the monotonous song of the turning wheel that became so familiar to us.78

  As the children grew up and moved away, Darwin and Emma would sit here together. Sometimes they would amble across the chalky fields to woods by Cudham and Keston, or sit out in the evenings to catch nightingales in song. “We were out last night nightingaling till 10.30 & returned to bread and cheese. There was a first rate one in the Rookery & we on Green hill heard him perfectly,” Emma told William. One favourite walk was to the pretty spot called Green-hill; another to what they called Hangrove, a terrace below Stoneyfield. “There were rabbits in the shaw, and Polly, the little fox-terrier, loved this walk too,” said Henrietta. “My father would pace to and fro, and my mother would sometimes sit on the dry chalky bank waiting for him, and be pulled by him up the little steep pitch on the way home.”79

  Much of Charles and Emma’s love for each other, undemonstrative and seasoned by more than thirty years of marriage, was tied up in these quiet walks together. Darwin’s emotions for his wife were of a piece with his sense of place, his attachment to his garden and the surrounding countryside. Being with her made him complete. As for Emma, although she must at times have found him self-absorbed, withdrawn, and insidiously demanding, these were the times when he was most relaxed, at peace with himself and his world. She became his protectress, straining to conserve his energies. Her commitment to him never wavered.80

  When they wanted to stay closer to home, they would stroll around the Sandwalk. This land, no more than an acre or so in size, was rented on an annual basis from John Lubbock, who since coming into his inheritance was by far the greatest landowner in the area. Early in 1874 Darwin asked if he might buy the wood from Lubbock, offering some grazing land of his own in return. The transaction caused some unpleasantness between the two friends.81 Lubbock—with all his riches—squeezed up the price too zealously, saying that Darwin should pay as if the land were suitable for building rather than mere agricultural use. The same accusation could be made of Darwin, a wealthy man who became churlish about a price he could well afford to pay. Francis said his father “was much grieved at Sir John making such a remarkably good bargain out of the Sandwalk which he sold at the highest accommodation kind of price. He used to compare it rather bitterly with Mr. Farrer selling at agricultural price to his neighbours.”82

  But the Sandwalk was his spiritual home. The boys liked to hear the click of his walking stick on the stones as he walked round the path on his own, first the light side, looking over the valley, then the dark side, under the trees. As a businesslike man, he would pile up a mound of flints at the turn of the path and knock one away every time he passed to ensure he made a predetermined number of circuits without having to interrupt his train of thought. Five turns around the path amounted to half a mile or so. The Sandwalk was where he pondered. In this soothing routine, a sense of place became preeminent in Darwin’s science. It shaped his identity as a thinker.

  Meanwhile, the tributes poured in. Some of them he treated humorously, as in 1872 when he accepted an invitation from John Jenner Weir to become patron of a cat show, warning him that “people may refuse to go and admire a lot of atheistical cats.”83 In the same year he was asked by the students of the University of Aberdeen to be their rector; by ancient privilege the undergraduates were allowed annually to elect an honorary leader from public men of the time.84 He refused, but was tickled to hear that the undergraduates were so determined to have an evolutionist that they asked Huxley, who accepted.

  Serious expressions of admiration also proliferated. During the 1870s many honorary memberships and fellowships came Darwin’s way. At the end of his life he belonged, in an honorary capacity, to more than sixty learned institutions or bodies world-wide.85 Some of the diplomas that arrived at Down House were lavish.

  Other kinds of honour crept in. In 1873, Karl Marx sent him a copy of Das Kapital, inscribing it “Mr. Charles Darwin on the part of his sincere admirer Karl Marx.” Darwin was conscious of the compliment being paid him.

  I heartily wish I was more worthy to receive it, by understanding more of the deep & important subject of political economy. Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of knowledge & that this in the long run is sure to add to the happiness of mankind.86

  The book remained in Darwin’s library uncut and unopened, and almost certainly unread. The contact between these two remarkable thinkers was, in truth, enigmatic. There is scant evidence for the story that Marx asked if he could dedicate a future edition of Das Kapital to Darwin in recognition of Darwin’s understanding of struggle in nature. On the contrary, it is much more likely that it was Edward Aveling who asked if he might dedicate one of his books to Darwin, and that this request was refused. The confusion emerged only after Darwin’s death, either through Aveling’s desire to link Darwinism with his own brand of revolutionary atheism, or because Marx’s papers were subsequently mixed up with Aveling’s. Either way, Marx consulted Darwin’s books when drafting Das Kapital and again when working on the second edition. He added an appreciative footnote to the second German edition, the one he sent Darwin, speaking of natural selection
as “the history of natural technology, that is, the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which serve as the instruments of production for sustaining their life.”87 As far as is known, the exchange of this presentation copy and the message of thanks was the only formal contact between them.

  IX

  If not letters and diplomas, it was spiritualism. Wallace’s newest book was out, boldly titled Miracles and Modern Spiritualism (1875); celebrated mediums were at work in every metropolitan centre; frauds and sensation-seekers joined hands with sceptics and enthusiasts in darkened rooms around a thousand tables. All of them sought affirmation that there was some form of existence after death. Darwin could no more divorce himself from these issues than from inquiries into his religious beliefs. Robustly, he said he believed in “none of it.”

  Credulity, he noted in alarm, was already at his front door. He flinched when Wallace told him that all matter was force, and force must be the product of a divine mind. He shook his head over the newspapers and protested at the way mediums exploited the bereaved. Emma’s brother Hensleigh Wedgwood had also hastened into the spiritualist movement, attending séances, communing with spirit-guides, and collecting spirit photographs. “Hensleigh in his study, living his separate life among the spirits,” complained Emma. She was not far wrong. Hensleigh Wedgwood later served as a founder member of the Society for Psychical Research in the 1880s.

  To Darwin and Emma, it seemed as if Hensleigh’s mind was nearly turned. “I always feel nowadays that he finds everything so flat & uninteresting except spiritualism,” murmured Emma unhappily. “His company is not of the old easy comfortable character it used to be.”88 In 1874 Hensleigh tried to get Huxley involved by sending him photographs of a purported apparition. “I consider fraud impossible,” he said, for the entire process had been supervised by himself and his daughter Effie. On the contrary, Huxley could hardly believe the photograph represented reality. He patiently explained that the photographer must have put a second image on the plate inside the camera before taking a picture.89 Hensleigh refused to believe him.

  Nevertheless, these sceptical menfolk wavered between being intrigued and exasperated. Even Francis Galton, an arch-sceptic, attended a number of séances and was “utterly confounded” by the goings-on. Members of the X Club and Metaphysical Society expressed interest in at least some spiritualist phenomena. George Romanes, a committed evolutionist, was intensely caught up in the movement, much to Darwin’s disgust, although this was but part and parcel of Romanes’s fascination with mental activity as a phenomenon.

  At last Darwin and Huxley gave in to Hensleigh’s urgings. Somewhat surprisingly, Darwin agreed to attend a séance arranged by his son George at Erasmus Darwin’s house in January 1874. It was a highly sociable occasion, uniting sceptics and believers, comprising the Litchfields, Emma and Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, Frederic Myers (the Cambridge classicist and later a prominent member of the Society for Psychical Research), Hensleigh and Fanny Wedgwood with their oldest daughter Julia, George Lewes and Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), and Erasmus’s friend Mrs.Bowen, as well as the medium hired for the occasion, Charles Williams. Darwin wanted Huxley to be there, and after reiterating that he did not believe in any of it either, Huxley arrived as an anonymous participant, although Williams could hardly have failed to recognise him. There may have been other people there also, because Emma mentioned “séance of 20 persons” in her diary. For her part, Emma was eager to meet the author of Middlemarch and took the opportunity to introduce herself as an enthusiastic reader. Darwin and Lewes, too, were as close as they ever were in their intellectual lives, for Lewes had always defended evolutionary theory in his fashion and was about to initiate the journal Mind, a publishing venture of mutual interest.

  This was to be no ordinary séance but a scientific test, with the medium secured hand and foot, and the room carefully monitored to prevent the legerdemain they all expected. Erasmus and George spent an hour or two beforehand peering under chairs and carpets. Williams—and Williams’s spirit-guide John King—were well known to Hensleigh Wedgwood, who regularly attended his séances. Indeed, most of the London mediums must have been wearily familiar with such scientific investigations, for Wallace, Crookes, and the others all insisted on tightly controlled precautions to allay ridicule. But when Williams demanded complete darkness, Lewes and Mary Ann Evans “left in disgust.”90 So did Darwin, although he described the scene afterwards with secondhand aplomb.

  We had grand fun, one afternoon, for George hired a medium, who made the chairs, a flute, a bell, and candlestick, and fiery points jump about in my brother’s dining room, in a manner that astounded every one, and took away all their breaths. It was in the dark, but George and Hensleigh Wedgwood held the medium’s hands and feet on both sides all the time. I found it so hot and tiring that I went away before all these astounding miracles, or jugglery, took place. How the man could possibly do what was done passes my understanding. I came downstairs, and saw all the chairs, etc. on the table, which had been lifted over the heads of those sitting around it. The Lord have mercy on us all, if we have to believe in such rubbish. F. Galton was there and says it was a good séance.91

  Henrietta Darwin said, “Mr. Lewes I remember was troublesome and inclined to make jokes and not sit in the dark in silence.” Francis later explained that his father regretted the enormous energy people poured into investigating the supernatural when the same effort might be directed into understanding reality. Francis said that Darwin declared “it was all imposture.”

  On the other hand, Huxley, Galton, Hensleigh Wedgwood, and George Darwin were sufficiently tantalised to arrange another séance a few weeks later. This took place at Hensleigh’s house. Huxley described the occasion to Darwin afterwards, with diagrams, explaining how the medium must have produced his effects, such as plucking guitar strings with his mouth, or, as Emma cynically suggested, touching George’s hand with his nose. Joyously, Huxley launched himself into exposing Williams as a charlatan. Hot on the trail, he stopped at nothing, teaching himself to snap his toe joints inside his boots in imitation of spirit raps on the table. Thin socks were essential, he said. “My conclusion is that Mr. Williams is a cheat and impostor,” he informed Darwin. This was just what his friend wanted to hear. “Now to my mind an enormous weight of evidence would be requisite to make one believe in anything beyond mere trickery.”

  A little later on, Williams was unmasked as a fraud by George Romanes, who paradoxically continued to give credence to the spirit world. Similarly, Hensleigh Wedgwood doggedly insisted on the independent existence of Williams’s spirit-guide, John King, while talking crossly about the “roguery of Williams.”92 With some satisfaction, Darwin told Romanes he should buy a copy of the Spiritualist, which was running a long article about the exposure. “Good Heavens what rubbish the whole does seem to be,” said Darwin.93

  But the demise of one medium was not enough to end the curiosity. In 1876, when the most famous medium of them all, the American Henry Slade, was humiliatingly denounced, Wallace testified in court on his behalf. Not a shadow of suspicion darkened Wallace’s mind. He said afterwards that Slade had not received a fair trial. In one respect, he was right to think that the scientists had ganged up against Slade. The biologist Ray Lankester, a friend of Huxley’s and Darwin’s from the South Kensington laboratories, played the central part in Slade’s downfall in a letter to the Times, itemising the tricks Slade used. For some months beforehand Lankester and Huxley had swopped recipes for fraudulent techniques. Spiritualists were ideal targets for scientists like these—perfect sparring partners—because if nothing else the contest enabled them to bring the full force of their minds into play. Huxley found the exercise wholly invigorating.

  This was no time for excessive displays of loyalty to Wallace, thought Darwin. His feelings ran so high that he privately sent Lankester £10, along with a congratulatory letter, to help the case for the prosecution of Slade.94

  chapter

>   11

  ENGLAND’S GREEN

  AND PLEASANT LAND

  HARLES DARWIN found peace among the plant pots. He knew his likes and dislikes well enough by now. A visit to the hothouse for a talk with his gardeners and then a stroll around the Sandwalk with a dog at his heels were an essential part of his day. All through the writing years he had devotedly kept up a variety of small botanical investigations, telling Emma that these served as his best form of relaxation.

  Nevertheless his experimental ambitions had been sidetracked by writing The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions. Now that he was free of writing, another round of bookish duties had crept in. He produced a revised edition of Descent in 1874 and a second edition of Variation in 1875, and made minor changes to the sixth edition of the Origin of Species (the same edition that had been issued in 1872), the last changes to be incorporated in his lifetime. Darwin paid Henrietta £20 for correcting the proofs of Variation. Murray released the amended sixth edition of the Origin in 1876 with a title page indicating that 18,000 copies had been printed in England alone since 1859.1 In the year of Darwin’s death the number had increased to 24,000. In these revised books Darwin eased into a more adaptationist frame of mind, suggesting that there was a role in evolutionary theory for the inheritance of some acquired characteristics—the result of his pondering the mechanisms underlying pangenesis, sexual selection, and the expression of emotions. Although he had never categorically excluded behaviourally or environmentally induced adaptations from his writings, he now felt they should play a larger part, telling Wallace that “I think I have underrated … the effects of the direct action of the external conditions in producing varieties.” As usual, John Murray, and Murray’s new business partner Robert Cooke, produced the volumes. Each one sold relatively well.