Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  This is in striking accordance with some unpublished experiments of my father, Mr. Charles Darwin, on the in-and-in breeding [sic] of plants; for he has found that in-bred plants, when allowed enough space and good soil, frequently show little or no deterioration, whilst when placed in competition with another plant, they frequently perish or are much stunted.70

  These two sons, George and Francis, plainly began their careers by defending and expanding on their father’s principles. In George’s next paper he tackled William Thomson over the age of the earth and its implications for evolutionary theory. He questioned Thomson’s figures, suggesting that the earth’s axis of rotation was subject to fluctuations large enough to cast doubt on Thomson’s conclusions. “It’s rather like a pea meeting a cannon ball to oppose him, but I feel tolerably safe at present, & if I am right it will be so much the greater triumph,” he wrote home in 1876. These fluctuations meant that the earth might be old enough after all for gradual biological evolution to have taken place. The paper was read before the Royal Society in 1876, was published in the society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1877, and was followed by George’s nomination for fellowship. Darwin nearly burst with pride. “Oh Lord what a set of sons I have, all doing wonders.” Thomson acknowledged the accuracy of George’s mathematics. This line of work, and a growing friendship with Thomson, was to occupy George for the greater part of his scientific life.

  More than happy with these developments, Darwin and Emma looked forward to the coming grandchild. Tragedy struck in September 1876 when Francis’s wife, Amy, died two days after childbirth, “a most dreadful blow,” said Darwin, who had known her since she was a girl. “I think she was the most gentle & sweet creature I ever knew.” He and Francis were with her when she died, a horrible death of convulsions followed by kidney failure, probably puerperal fever, a kind of septic shock. He told William, “It is the most dreadful thing which has ever happened, worse than poor Annie’s death, though not so grievous to me. I cannot bear to think of the future.”

  God knows what will become of poor Frank, his life will be a miserable wreck. He is too young to care for the Baby, which must be brought here, & I trust in God we may persuade him to come here & not to live in his house surrounded by memorials of her. No Father ever had better children than we have & you are one of the best of all.—God bless you.—I hope you keep pretty well. Tell us always about yourself.71

  He wrote the same miserable message to Leonard, adding only that “Frank seemed quite bewildered and dazed.” He turned to Hooker. “My dear old Friend I know that you will forgive me pouring out my grief.”

  This experience of death and suffering struck hard at the heart of the family. It was not in any sense the good death beloved of sentimental writers. Amy had “suffered greatly.” Paradoxically, Darwin was more familiar than Emma with the physical realities of dying bodies, having been at the deathbeds of all three of his children and now Amy. He bore up under these experiences with a fortitude that belies the common assumption that he usually recoiled from emotional involvement.72 Even though he must surely have preferred to avoid such traumatic personal events, he could face them when necessary. This time, it was he who gave his wife and family the emotional support they craved.

  Francis was desperately unhappy, and he and the newborn baby, a boy they called Bernard, moved up the road to Down House, the only sensible step for him to take in such a situation. His wife was buried in Wales, in her father’s village, and Francis spent some weeks there before returning to close up Down Lodge, the marital home. “I felt I couldn’t bear A.’s loss,” said Emma, finding her sympathetic feelings for her son nearly “intolerable.” Emma arranged nurses and cots at Down House while Darwin tried to keep Francis preoccupied with plants. A sympathetic father, he hoped that Francis might be able to work himself out of his distress.

  Live and work with them he did. Domestic chaos reigned for a while. Emma opened up the old nursery wing and turned the billiard room into a sitting room for Francis, next door to his father’s study. A girl called Mary Anne (“Nanna”) came up from the village to serve as a nursemaid to Bernard, and an admiring circle of female staff quickly gathered round. Fortunately for all, Bernard was fat, placid, and healthy, little trouble for a large and well-trimmed household despite the sad circumstances of his arrival. As he grew up, he became the natural centre of attention. Darwin was besotted. Emma told Henrietta, “Your father is taking a good deal to the baby. We think he (the baby) is a sort of Grand Lama, he is so solemn.”

  This time around Emma knew how to relax and enjoy the experience of another baby in the house. Her husband was equally transformed. He did not catalogue or observe Bernard, as he had done with his own children. He merely adored at the shrine, along with the others. As time softened the blow of Amy’s death, Bernard brought a great deal of simple joy into their lives. “The baby is quite a prize article in point of fat and healthiness and may become handsome, though far from it now,” said Emma. “He has a pretty mouth and expression, and is particularly amused at his grandfather’s face. I am surprised at his making out the expression from such a mass of beard.” The real casualty was Francis. He yearned for physical contact. “How often, when a man, I have wished when my father was behind my chair, that he would pass his hand over my hair, as he used to do when I was a boy.”73

  Soon afterwards, Darwin published the results of his work on cross-fertilisation, wistfully accepting the truth of his suspicion that “there are not many persons who are interested about the fertilization of flowers.”74 Then, at the end of the year his second edition of Orchids came out.

  IX

  Letters continued to roll in, alternately useful or bizarre. A German editor called Otto Zacharias inquired if he could translate George’s article on cousin marriages into German. The resulting pamphlet sold rather well, reported Zacharias a few years later.

  Zacharias also asked if he could use Darwin’s name on a new journal he wished to start in Germany, called Darwinia. The plan came to naught, and Zacharias bowed out in 1877 when Ernst Krause founded Kosmos with Darwin’s endorsement. Such journals, as they all recognised, played a fundamental role in distributing evolutionary ideas. The story of Nature’s conception in 1869 was prime evidence of the value of having a tightly controlled, well-distributed mouthpiece, and it seems that first Zacharias and then Krause intended to fill the same broad-based cultural niche in German science. There was a gap in the market, to be sure. One of the first journals to take up Darwin’s views in Germany had been the weekly magazine Ausland (“Abroad”), a heady mix of biology and society, pumped up with a stream of articles from Haeckel and other evolutionists. During the Franco-Prussian War, the editor, Friedrich von Hellwald, claimed Darwinism as proof that warfare between nations was a natural law, a standard view of the time that did not prevent his journal’s expiry a few years afterwards.

  Krause’s Kosmos conveniently filled the hole. Krause explicitly based the journal on the “theory of evolution in connection with Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel.” He favoured Haeckel’s theory of monism, and made its columns notable for high-level discussions on heredity. Furthermore, it was in the pages of Kosmos that the bitter argument between Haeckel and Rudolf Virchow over the political meaning of Darwinism in Germany was played out. Virchow—who never liked Darwin’s proposals despite a mild interest in transformism—vehemently attacked natural selection on political grounds at the Munich meeting of German naturalists and physicians in 1877.75 He denounced the ideological roots of Darwin’s theory, calling natural selection a dangerous fantasy of individualistic self-betterment. If this was adopted by democrats, as well as radical socialists, he said, it might contribute to the destabilisation of the German state. Haeckel countered by pointing out that Darwinism (as he saw it) was strictly hierarchical and “aristocratic” because of the driving force of survival of the fittest.76 In Bismarck’s Germany, with north and south forcibly united across widening political and social rifts, the threat o
f destabilisation was real enough. The journal Kreuz Zeitung blamed the theory of descent for the “treasonable” assassination attempt on Emperor Wilhelm by the social democrat Emil Hodel. Haeckel responded to Virchow with his Freedom in Science and Teaching, translated into English in 1879 with a rousing preface by Huxley. With this fertile context in which to plant a journal, Krause issued nineteen volumes of Kosmos from 1877 to 1886.

  Darwin also received letters incongruously revealing his high place in other people’s minds. During a correspondence with a gardener at a lunatic asylum he once discovered, secreted into an envelope, a note from one of the patients, in which the writer claimed he was wrongfully confined and begged to be saved. Like a character out of The Woman in White, Darwin tried to have the man released, only to find that the inmate wrote letters like that all the time. Elsewhere, an unknown child was named in his honour in Hamburg. A correspondent asked his opinion on the possibility of a flying machine powered by birds. A man living in Yorkshire told him, “I have two Alligators now about 3 feet long, which I keep in the mill ponds. I have good opportunity for noting their habits should you wish to know about them.”77

  Many of these transactions were a source of gentle amusement. In February 1877, Darwin received as a birthday tribute an enormous album of photographs of German naturalists, sumptuously bound. This, conceived as a mark of respect, had been organised by Haeckel, Otto Zacharias, and William Preyer, and forwarded to Down House by Emil Rade from Munster. More than 150 men of science presented their photographs and signatures. “It is by far the greatest honour which I have ever received,” Darwin wrote gratefully to Haeckel. In the same postbag, a cascade of letters arrived from naturalists who had been omitted from the volume, each hastening to assure Darwin of their undying devotion and modern attitude to biology.

  Within the week, another huge parcel arrived from the Netherlands. Emma noted the contents.

  F. was expecting about this time (his birthday today) an album containing photos of German men of science, when yesterday arrived a most gorgeous purple velvet & silver Dutch album of the same sort with 219 portraits—some of youths, some girls & some fat women, I suppose any one who subscribed. However it shews a v. different state of feeling about him. You wd. not get boys & fat women in England to subscribe & send him their photos as a mark of respect.78

  Fame manifested itself in other ways as well. William Gladstone, leader of the Liberal party, came to call with a group of John Lubbock’s weekend guests in March 1877. The male members of Lubbock’s house party, comprising Gladstone, Huxley, Lyon Playfair, and John Morley, walked over to see Darwin at Down House on Sunday 11 March.79 Morley had reviewed The Descent of Man in the Pall Mall Gazette and was as keen as the rest to meet its author.

  Lubbock knew the visit would be acceptable. Darwin quite plainly regarded it as “an honour,” and mentioned it subsequently with considerable awe. Gladstone was less overcome but interested to meet the naturalist nonetheless. He wrote in his diary, “Called on & saw Mr Darwin, whose appearance is pleasing and remarkable.… conversation with Mr Morley, Prof Huxley & others.”80 John Morley cynically recorded an alternative view. He said Gladstone settled down in a chair at Down House and for two hours bored them by reading out loud the proofs of his latest Turkish pamphlet. Darwin told Charles Eliot Norton about it with barely suppressed excitement.

  Our quiet, however, was broken a couple of days ago by Gladstone calling here.—I never saw him before & was much pleased with him: I expected a stern, overwhelming sort of man, but found him as soft & smooth as butter, & very pleasant. He asked me whether I thought that the United States would hereafter play a much greater part in the history of the world than Europe. I said that I thought it would, but why he asked me, I cannot conceive & I said that he ought to be able to form a far better opinion,—but what that was he did not at all let out.81

  Darwin and Gladstone exchanged a few letters on colour perception in infants after this, a topic that wisely avoided theological matters but one that intrigued them as a possible clue to what the primal state of the human senses might be.82 Gladstone never swerved from the strictest possible line of orthodox Christianity. A few years later he sent Darwin one of his essays on Homer, pointing out Homer’s accurate observations of expressive movements. Darwin replied obsequiously, “Although you are so kind as to tell me not to acknowledge the receipt of your Essay, in which you show how wonderfully Homer distinguished different kinds of movement, yet I must beg permission to thank you for this honour.”83

  Ever afterwards, Darwin and Emma felt they had experienced high-level politics at first hand. Lifelong liberals, they were predisposed towards Gladstone’s policies and followed his and Lubbock’s speeches conscientiously, discussing the newspapers and pamphlets in the evenings by the fire until Gladstone’s position on the Home Rule for Ireland question drew their ire. But to have entertained him in their drawing room made all the difference. After Darwin’s death, Emma became an ardent Unionist.

  Inevitably, with a baby in the house, Darwin’s mind also turned back to his old notes on infant behaviour. In April 1877, when Bernard was six or seven months old (“such a little duck,” said Francis indulgently), Darwin published extracts from his diary of observations on child development as a “Biographical Sketch of an Infant” in the new psychological journal Mind. Hippolyte Taine had put forward an essay in a previous number in which Taine described his daughter’s development during the first eighteen months of her life, attending particularly to language acquisition. Darwin thought his own observations extended some of the remarks Taine made. He sent the notes to the editor, George Croom Robertson. “If you do not think fit, as is very likely, will you please return it to me.”84

  Once published, Darwin’s observations were perceived as a valuable contribution to the emerging field of developmental psychology. Like Taine, and like Tiedemann a century before him, the material provided data for contemporary theories of individuality, consciousness, and the will, as well as contributing to the understanding of emerging language skills and intellect. Darwin’s methodology—his careful watching and recording—was a sensitive research instrument.85 That the observations were made by such a renowned naturalist no doubt helped. William Preyer’s book-length study, The Soul of a Child (1882), drew on Darwin’s and Taine’s researches and was widely regarded as an important early work in modern child psychology. Yet Darwin was baffled that a study of a baby, bereft of any obvious interpretative remarks, should be so popular when his plant books were such slow sellers. His Mind article was soon translated into German and French and generated a substantial postbag.

  X

  Without pausing for breath, Darwin and Francis pushed on with a volume called The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species, published in July 1877. The book was dedicated to Asa Gray, “as a small tribute of respect and affection.”

  This book on flowers was another highly technical treatise in which Darwin juxtaposed his previously published thoughts on the question with new researches. “Plants are splendid for making one believe in Natural Selection,” he told Huxley around now, “as will and consciousness are excluded.” His achievement was to reveal the results of different “marriages” in plants, for example the primrose with its thrum and pin-headed flowers. If two flowers of exactly the same kind mated, the offspring were fewer in number and often displayed reduced fertility. “No little discovery of mine ever gave me so much pleasure as the making out the meaning of heterostyled flowers. The results of crossing such flowers in an illegitimate manner, I believe to be very important as bearing on the sterility of hybrids; although these results have been noticed by only a few persons.”

  The metaphor of marriage was very real to him, as to Linnaeus before him.86 Darwin viewed the sexual lives of these plants as if they were flesh-and-blood humans, prone to all the marital mistakes and inappropriate yearnings of romantic fiction. He wrote of “illegitimate unions” between flowers, and of the poor quality of
the offspring, reflecting in his imagery all the undercurrents of his own and George’s work on first-cousin marriages. Working away in his greenhouse forcibly creating trays of bastards and infertile degenerates, he initiated a wide variety of plant matings that would have made any visiting clergyman blush. He harangued his botanical friends on the question, blind to the fact that only experts would be able to understand the complex issues involved. He read the newest books on plant crossing, hybridisation, and inheritance, taking up some of August Weismann’s work on heredity with enthusiasm. Here, he thought, were functional causes for the incipient sterility sometimes observed between varieties of the same species. Here, in fact, was divergence in action, an answer at last to Huxley’s complaint that natural selection could never select for sterility. Putting it at its simplest, Darwin thought “illegitimate” seedlings were almost like hybrids between members of a single species.

  XI

  A frisson of scandal briefly fluttered on the horizon. For a moment he got embroiled in the notorious obscenity trial of Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant, the first a prominent atheist and author, the second popularly thought to be a freethinker in sexual matters. The impending trial alternately thrilled and agitated the nation, a Victorian counterpart to the legal commotion nearly a hundred years later surrounding D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In a sixpenny pamphlet issued early in 1877, Besant and Bradlaugh had described the perils of over-population and recommended various methods of contraception. The pamphlet was a revised version of Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy or the Private Companion of Young Married Couples, a book that had already been available for several decades. This time around, in Besant and Bradlaugh’s hands, the pamphlet addressed a completely new audience, issuing dire Malthusian warnings about degeneration, dissipation, and “unrestrained gratification of the reproductive instinct.” By explaining the means of contraception to the masses they hoped to avert these calamities.