Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  A few months later, Lord Hartismere was persuaded by Cobbe and other antivivisectionists to put a bill forward to Parliament to regulate physiological laboratories. Hartismere’s bill proposed that vivisection be confined to premises that were annually registered with the home secretary, and that animals be properly anaesthetised. Curare was singled out as not suitable for the purpose.

  Darwin was dismayed by the terms of this bill, not least that private scholars would need a personal license to work in their own homes. With deadly efficiency, he set about drawing up a counter-petition to protect “the science of physiology as well as animals.” His physiological friends were astonished to see him roused to such intense political action. Astonished and gratified. Perhaps only someone with Darwin’s Olympian presence could have united such a disparate band at this juncture. His petition hit his friends’ letterboxes and they signed it in droves.

  The activity increased during his customary visit to London. Although the response to his petition was gratifying, Darwin decided that he would be better advised to get a blocking bill presented in Parliament. He lobbied all his senior political acquaintances. Richard Litchfield drafted a proposed bill for him, which Darwin sent for approval to Burdon Sanderson and other leading physiologists, each and every one personally known to him. Hooker signed as president of the Royal Society, and Darwin wrote to advise Lord Derby that the bill would be introduced to Parliament by Lyon Playfair (as Lubbock recommended). Darwin made sure to secure prestigious backing in both houses, including Lord Cardwell and the Earl of Shaftesbury. With a turn of speed and purpose that may have surprised even himself, he deliberately used his status to advance his cause.

  He did the work well. The opposing bills from science and the public (with more common ground between them than might be at first be supposed) caused such a stir that a Royal Commission was appointed to investigate the entire issue. The commission was put under the direction of Lord Cardwell, a senior Liberal statesman who was often brought in by Gladstone for seemingly impossible problems of arbitration. Not surprisingly, Darwin was called to give evidence to this commission. “F. went to the Vivisection Commission at two,” wrote Emma.

  Lord Cardwell came to the door to receive him and he was treated like a duke. They only wanted him to repeat what he had said in his letter (a sort of confession of faith about the claims of physiology and the duty of humanity) and he had hardly a word to add, so that it was over in ten minutes, Lord C. coming to the door and thanking him. It was a great compliment to his opinion, wanting to have it put upon the minutes.28

  Darwin was involved again and again until the year of his death. The authority of his presence in this debate and his unimpeachable qualities as a witness made him more visible than he had been for years. He felt fighting spirit flood back into his aging veins. Fame was not always a burden.

  V

  At last his son William persuaded him to sit for an oil portrait. The process of persuasion had taken ages. William first made the suggestion in 1872 after the family had visited Southampton, confiding to Henrietta, “I mean to have a portrait done of Father by Watts, unless anybody can persuade me that it will be a failure probably either from Watts not taking to this kind of subject, or being ill, &c. &c. &c. The expense will not be more than £500 and if F. jibbs, I am game to pay it.… Please keep quite dark.”29

  Darwin kept finding objections. “He often talked laughingly of the small worth of portraits,” remembered Francis with regret, “and said that a photograph was worth any number of pictures, as if he were blind to the artistic quality in a painted portrait. But this was generally said in his attempts to persuade us to give up the idea of having his portrait painted, an operation very irksome to him.”30 The root cause of these objections was probably the feeling that many people share about portraiture—anxiety about being thought vain, and the time that it would take. Underneath, he may have sensed that the process of having a portrait painted was a form of intense personal appraisal. He really did not like the idea of anyone penetrating too closely. He had placed Woolner’s bust in an unobtrusive corner of the dining room and routinely deflected any comments by laughing about it in a dismissive fashion. “He used to point with scorn at the conventional way in which the head in a great many busts such as the one in the dining room was attached at the neck,” said William, a trifle sadly.31

  Patiently William parried all his father’s objections. At the end of 1874, Darwin agreed. For unknown reasons, the artist Frederick Watts was not approached, even though he was then working on his “Hall of Fame,” the portraits of eminent figures that he ultimately presented to the National Portrait Gallery. Instead, the commission went to Walter William Ouless. The portrait was completed in March 1875. William intended it to remain in the family. As it happened, the picture was distributed rather more widely than this. Ouless exhibited it at the Royal Academy in 1875. It was subsequently engraved by Paul Rajon and published in the Illustrated London News in 1877. A little while later Ouless made a copy in oils for Christ’s College Cambridge, Darwin’s old college.

  Ouless stayed at Down House for the sittings for a few days in February 1875, Darwin grumbling about time that could better have been spent in his hothouse and Emma wondering how to entertain the artist between his painting engagements. Eventually, she hit on an idea which she revealed to Leonard, away with the army in New Zealand.

  Mr Ouless is painting F. and me! He cannot nearly fill up his time with F. so it was a convenient time for me to sit. Both portraits are unutterable as yet; but he puts in the youth and beauty at the very last.32

  She never liked the results. Despite Francis’s and William’s praising the painting of Darwin, with Francis regarding it “the finest representation of my father that has been produced,” Emma felt it did not depict the man she knew. No trace of Ouless’s portrait of Emma has ever been found. When Rajon came down in 1877 to show his engraving, she said, “We expect M. Rajon today with the picture & a proof sheet of etching, which I expect will exaggerate the faults of the picture viz. roughness & dismality.” Three days later she was still cantankerous.

  M. Rajon came down on Thursday bringing the picture & a proof sheet of the etching. They all admired it but I rather dislike etchings & don’t like the picture; so it was not likely to please me.33

  Darwin felt ambivalent too. Writing to Hooker after the painting was completed, he reflected, “I look a very venerable, acute melancholy old dog,—whether I really look so I do not know.”34

  Silently, he and Emma removed this painting from their immediate surroundings. When their friend and neighbour Alice Bonham Carter wondered if it might be displayed at the Bromley School of Science during an evening conversazione to encourage local naturalists and scientists, they withheld consent. “Alice wanted us to send Ouless’ picture,” Emma told William, “but F. cd not stand exhibiting himself in that way.”35

  The following spring he and Emma went to London to visit Henrietta as usual. This time Darwin stated a wish to see Hooker sitting in the presidential chair at the Royal Society. The two Cambridge sons, George and Horace, came up to London to join him.

  G. and Horace came on Wed. to go to the Royal Soc. soirée and F. went with them! There was such a crowd he only cd. behave like a crowned head shake hands & before he cd. enter on any talk somebody else came up. Many of them he did not know, & one was so affectionate he was ashamed to ask & parted from him with the greatest effusion. I don’t think it will be worth while his going again. However it did him no harm.36

  Darwin took a different view. “Tell Hooker I feel greatly aggrieved by him. I went to the Royal Society to see him for once in the chair of the Royal to admire his dignity and enjoy it, and lo and behold, he was not there.”

  VI

  As time went by, Darwin occasionally thought about writing down a few recollections of his life. There was no pressure to do so, he said; no ambition to seal his past in aspic; and, as he saw it, no particular need to search for self-justif
icatory causes and effects. Others might regard him as a hero, or, as Emma said, a crowned head of science, but he felt no such conviction.

  Yet there were many things that encouraged him to dwell on long-gone days. A little while previously, in the autumn of 1875, he had been asked for some biographical reminiscences by Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg, a German exile in Paris. Hesse-Wartegg had been one of the few reviewers who spoke favourably about Insectivorous Plants, and Darwin consequently felt kindly towards him. Hesse-Wartegg inquired if Darwin might supply information about the development of his mind and character for an article in a Leipzig journal called the Pioneer, which would then be syndicated to the German encyclopedias.37 The older man usually disliked dealing with these requests. Still, Hesse-Wartegg’s letter sparked his imagination. Like Huxley, he fell into the understandable trap of thinking that the most accurate account would be the one written by himself.38

  Odd details of the past also teased his memory. He sympathised with Katherine Lyell, doing her utmost to memorialise Lyell in a volume of life and letters. Pensively, he gathered up the letters he had received from his geological friend over the decades and sent them to Katherine to use in her book, an enduring friendship now ignominiously reduced to two brown paper packages. “I hope that I may die before my mind fails to a sensible extent,” he caught himself thinking. He reminded William Darwin Fox of their longstanding intimacy. Every morning, as he turned over his botanical notes, many of them written at Maer Hall or Shrewsbury when he was just married, others during long-forgotten holidays at Elizabeth’s and Charlotte’s homes in Hartfield, he contemplated his past and sensed time slipping away. So many loved ones dead, so many changes in science.

  However, it was family news that provided the real push. In the spring of 1876, Francis and Amy announced that they were to have a child. Darwin and Emma rejoiced: the baby would be their first grandchild. They had worried a little about Henrietta’s continuing childlessness, and in an unintentionally poignant note written after Francis and Amy’s announcement, Henrietta partly acknowledged the gap herself. “I feel as long as I have Father & you it does instead of our having children & makes our lives quite full, for you are the dearest Father & Mother that ever anyone had.”39 Apart from Francis and Henrietta, none of the others had edged towards marriage, not even William at the advanced age of thirty-seven.

  The thought of the impending baby pleased Darwin greatly. He had loved his own children dearly. So when a few peaceful weeks sailed into view during a visit to Hensleigh and Fanny Wedgwood’s country house in May 1876, he began a short autobiographical memoir, opening it with the hope that it would amuse his children and their children. “I know that it would have interested me greatly to have read even so short and dull a sketch of the mind of my grandfather written by himself, and what he thought and did and how he worked,” he confided.40

  Over succeeding months he added paragraphs here and there as things occurred to him, and in May 1881 he conscientiously filled up the gap from August 1876. One important addition was fourteen pages of reminiscences of his father, Dr. Robert Darwin of Shrewsbury. Darwin very much wanted to write this section not merely to honour his father and to make sure that successive generations would be put in touch with their history but also to resolve his own relationship with the Shrewsbury past. “I do not think any one could love a father much more than I did mine, and I do not believe three or four days ever pass without my still thinking of him,” he had revealed to Hooker with unaccustomed frankness when Hooker’s father died. There was more than a little self-deception in those words. In his autobiography Darwin turned his father into a bully. He said he owed his father nothing in mental ability. “My father’s mind was not scientific, and he did not try to generalise his knowledge under general laws.… I do not think that I gained much from him intellectually.” Moreover, he evidently thought his father had misjudged him. He still smarted at the outburst that he noted in his autobiography, “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family,” exactly remembering the words and the mortification he had felt but neither the year nor the surrounding context. When Darwin’s sister Caroline read these passages after Darwin’s death she was upset to realise that even in old age he had no idea how much he had been loved by their father.41 Perhaps she failed to see—as Darwin also failed to see—that he was distancing himself from his father by insisting that he had always been independent, standing alone. As for the female side of his ancestry, Darwin ignored it completely. Darwin, seemingly like many Victorian intellectuals, regarded the development of his mind within a predominantly patrilineal descent.42

  Once he was into the swing of writing about himself, Darwin found the work an agreeable way to pass the summer, the more especially because he did not need to look anything up in learned journals or check the accuracy of his facts. He made a number of minor slips, as might be expected in an informal family memoir written at the end of a full and varied life. Anecdotes and reminiscences flowed. He included stories about the famous people he had met, just the kind of thing that people were already recording about him, and laughed at Lyell for relishing the same high-society entertainments that he dismissed. He took no care over his style, for the pages were not designed to be read by anyone other than members of the family. He did not bother to pursue episodes that escaped his memory, letting his narrative trot on in a straightforward line toward his achievements. As a result, the work embodied many of the charms and oddities of an English gentleman at home: polite, considerate, shy, and amusingly self-deprecating; and yet unable or unwilling to delve too far below the surface. With a modest smile Darwin deflected every difficult question that a more demanding, self-analytical author might have asked of himself.

  He was clear about the piece not being intended for publication. Writing to Julius Carus in 1879, he said, “I have never even dreamed of publishing my own auto-biography.”43 While this remark seems hard fully to accept in retrospect, it seems fair to say that Darwin at the time of writing believed—or wanted to believe—that he was directing his remarks only to friends and family. The skimpy explanations of his actions that he offered, the comfortable expectation that he would be believed, the avoidance of difficult memories or troubling emotions, all suggest that he approached the project informally, in a relaxed frame of mind. Nevertheless, in choosing which memories to record in words, in selecting the anecdotes, he was constructing himself in the shape in which he wished to know himself and to be known by.44

  Towards the end, he did try to estimate his character, reflecting on the spread of issues that Galton’s questionnaire and other inquirers had set before him. But he was not introspective by nature. He probably felt a mixture of distaste and apprehension about people rummaging around in his life, even if this should be himself, and unwilling to open up to scrutiny. More important, he evidently felt, were words of support to his sons, whose aptitude, he believed, lay, like his own, in perseverance and nothing else.

  Above all he seems to have found it inappropriate or difficult to reveal his innermost feelings. He did not attempt anything like the analysis and score-settling that usually accompany the autobiographical genre. He acknowledged his debts to Lyell and to Henslow with grace but very little fervour. His voice was apologetic, humble, accepting at face value his own and others’ motives, unquestioning, even-tempered, and conversational, an unfolding of the pleasantly unassuming persona that would ultimately lie at the centre of the Darwin legend. This was not just the superficial language of gentlemanly respectability. To him, raw emotions were probably too intense for written words. The only exception was his private writing about his dead daughter Annie, pages that were not meant for any eyes other than his own and Emma’s.

  But in many cases the rawness had evidently dissipated with the years. In writing these “recollections” he felt none of the exuberance of his early letters from Cambridge or Shrewsbury, none of the verve of his Beagle correspondence. This
does not mean to say that he dismissed the passions he had once experienced, especially the passion for natural history. In general, he looked back on his enthusiasms with indulgent bemusement, full of affability and fondness, almost as if he were another man completely. Perhaps he did believe he was another man. In this memoir he emphasised his intellectual achievements, his books, his contribution to the advance of knowledge, tending to undervalue his creative involvement in the process. He seemed to say that science made him, rather than he made the science. In a disconcerting turn of phrase, he said he wrote “as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life,” and his spare, unadorned sentences did convey something of this bleak neutrality. “Nor have I found this difficult, for life is nearly over with me,” he continued.

  He mentioned Emma only to praise her. He scarcely mentioned his children, except for recollecting Anne’s death in 1851 (“we have suffered only one very severe grief”) and the fond memory of childhoods outgrown. “When you were very young, it was my delight to play with you all, and I think with a sigh that such days can never return.”45 He said that his life after his marriage was merely the story of writing his various books. He spoke about himself not as a person, living and growing, but as a series of publications, an author.46