Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  The resulting scandal brought together the most learned minds of the Victorian legal system. In April 1877, Besant and Bradlaugh were arrested and charged with obscenity for their “dirty filthy book.”87 In June, Bradlaugh wrote from gaol to Darwin asking if he would testify in their support. Bradlaugh had every reason to believe that Darwin—who was a well-known secular thinker, author of The Descent of Man, and a prominent advocate for Malthusian views in nature—would be likely to defend the rational application of natural selection to mankind and verify the pamphlet’s views on overcrowding.88 He did not know Darwin except by repute, although he may have hoped that Annie Besant’s connection with Moncure Conway, an acquaintance of Darwin’s, might help his request along.

  Bradlaugh hoped in vain. Darwin responded immediately, declaring he would have nothing to do with either a subpoena or an obscenity trial. If called to court, he would vigorously testify against Bradlaugh and Besant’s case.

  I have not seen the book in question but for notices in the newspaper. I suppose that it refers to means to prevent conception. If so I should be forced to express in court a very decided opinion in opposition to you & Mrs. Besant.… I believe that any such practices would in time lead to unsound women & would destroy chastity, on which the family bond depends; & the weakening of this bond would be the greatest of all possible evils to mankind.89

  Here, Darwin made it plain that he believed that civilised societies best advanced by childbirth taking place only within the respectable boundaries of marriage—a point of view that had also been the gist of Malthus’s original remarks. Like Malthus, Darwin disparaged contraception, which he regarded as an impediment to natural processes. He thought easy access to contraception would lead to unfettered sexual activity outside marriage, which in turn would introduce licentiousness and vice, inadequate care of children, financial insecurity, death, and disease. “If it were universally known that the birth of children could be prevented, and this were not thought immoral by married persons, would there not be great danger of extreme profligacy amongst unmarried women?” he wrote in a concerned manner to George Arthur Gaskell, an advocate of birth control.

  Like Malthus, too, he seemingly believed contraception should not be used within marriage either. His ten children were proof of this view. “I am strongly opposed to all such views & plans,” he reiterated in 1878 when asked to defend another contraceptive publication.90 He was humane enough, however, to feel something of a dilemma over how far society might be justified in intervening in the human reproductive process—he did not wish for humans to exist in a complete state of nature and undoubtedly remained aware that fertility has social consequences. From time to time, he queried the rationale for charitable measures to relieve the sick and the poor, saying that such intervention tended to preserve the unfit. But he also stated that civilised human beings were civilised precisely because they looked after their weak and needy. “The evil which would follow by checking benevolence and sympathy in not fostering the weak and diseased would be greater than by allowing them to survive and then to procreate.”91

  After such a reply, it was hard for Bradlaugh to continue to ask for Darwin’s presence in court. As expected, Bradlaugh and Besant were found guilty, although the sentence was relatively light, just a fine and a pledge to withdraw the book from circulation. But the personal damage was done. Annie Besant’s life spiralled rapidly downwards thereafter. Her estranged husband initiated a court case to remove their daughter from her care, itself a turning point in legal history. She converted to Madame Blavatsky’s mystical doctrines of reincarnation and theosophy and became involved with Edward Aveling on the National Reformer. Towards the end, she turned her eyes to India. Bradlaugh won a seat in Parliament that he never occupied because he refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the monarch.

  Coming straight from his work on “legitimate” and “illegitimate” unions among plants, his private life a tranquil pool of liberal-conservative social principles accompanied by a vision of an advancing British society built on moral and financial rectitude, Darwin’s response to Bradlaugh made it clear that he had never believed more strongly in family values.

  chapter

  12

  HOME IS THE SAILOR

  ARWIN SPENT the next few years staring into the past. Discarding his other obligations in the summer of 1877, he started digging for earthworms, harking back to a project he had begun even before he was married. For a long time now, he had taken a tender interest in worms. Bit by bit, this developed into his last major undertaking in natural history.

  He believed that earthworms were vastly underestimated agents in transforming the earth’s surface by bringing up tilth from below, creating fertile mould, and causing stones to sink. “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organised creatures.”1 When he had first arrived at Down House in 1842 he had recorded the types of agricultural treatments on particular fields with a view to seeing which surface changes over a number of years might be attributed to worm action. That investigation had grown out of the early articles on worm activity that he had presented to the Geological Society in 1837 and in itself had indicated that he intended putting down roots and staying permanently in the vicinity. He recorded similar data when visiting Emma’s father’s estate and those of his uncles, and from time to time he would inquire of them how various fields were getting along. Occasionally, he asked obliging friends and relatives to investigate worm-casts for him on summer mornings.2 (Amy Ruck, Francis’s wife, had first endeared herself to Darwin through her willingness to measure the depth of Welsh wormholes.) In the main, Darwin hoped to ascertain how far, and how quickly, dressings of whitish marl, or cinders, or stable manure sank beneath the surface; and how rapidly large stones might become entombed by soil. These changes he attributed to worms’ constantly bringing fine tilth up to the surface in their droppings, gradually covering any surface items and transforming the upper layers of the earth. Worms were making history, he thought grandiloquently. They were archaeologists in reverse, burying the face of nature.

  It was a perfect project for a man with his circle of landed connections. Perfect, too, for a slow-moving country gentleman with a penchant for leisurely, appreciative walks at home and on the estates of friends and relatives. He and Emma wandered out in the evenings to the chalk fields along the top of the neighbouring downs, to Cudham woods, Keston, and all about, so that he could prod the ground with his stick, turn over stones, and scan the land for worm activity.

  It was an occupation that Emma found attractive too, reminiscent of the relaxed days of their early courtship. “F. was made very happy by finding two very old stones at the bottom of the field,” she observed while they were staying at Caroline’s house (Leith Hill Place) in June 1877. These stones were ancient slabs from a limekiln, five feet long, fairly sunk into the ground. Caroline’s gardeners lifted them for Darwin the following day. Underneath, the fine black mould of worms was obvious. It was a long job and Emma worried whether Darwin was taking proper precautions. “F. has had great sport with the stones, but I thought he would have a sunstroke.”3

  Stealthily, earthworms crawled into his high days and holidays. He asked William to look out for worm-casts during a trip to Malvern. He counted on George for the same when on holiday in Madeira. On rainy days Francis Galton counted dead worms for him on the tarmac paths in Hyde Park (“one for every two-and-a-half paces”). And he sent inquiry after inquiry to George Romanes asking for definitions of animal intelligence that might be stretched to include the limited responses of these simple creatures. “I tried to observe what passed in my own mind when I did the work of a worm,” he said engagingly.

  If I come across a professed metaphysician, I will ask him to give me a more technical definition, with a few big words about the abstract, the concrete, the absolute, and the infinite; but seriously I should be grateful for any suggestions, for it
will hardly do to assume that every fool knows what “intelligent” means.4

  There was fun to be had. One year, during his and Emma’s annual pilgimage to William in Southampton, Darwin impulsively decided to hunt for worms at Stonehenge. He and Emma took the train to Salisbury armed with a spade and a piece of Lady Lubbock’s notepaper on which there was an engraved picture of the stone circle: Lubbock was a prominent parliamentary advocate for archaeological preservation long before such sites were regarded as national treasures. At that time there was access for all, even for scientists with digging on their minds. Darwin grubbed around the base of the fallen stones while Emma admired the scenery.

  We loitered about and had a great deal of talk with an agreeable old soldier placed there by Sir Ed. Antrobus (owner) who was keeping guard and reading a devout book, with specs on. He was quite agreeable to any amount of digging, but sometimes visitors came who were troublesome, and once a man came with a sledge-hammer who was very difficult to manage.… They did not find much good about the worms, who seem to be very idle out there. Mrs Cutting gave us a gorgeous lunch and plenty of Apollinaris water. We drove back a lower way, very pretty by the river and rich valleys and close under Old Sarum—very striking.5

  His curiosity whetted, Darwin also pursued worms at Thomas Farrer’s property in Surrey. Luckily for him, in 1877 one of Farrer’s estate hands accidentally turned up the remains of a Roman villa in a ploughed field, and Farrer invited Darwin to come and watch the excavations. Five-foot-deep trenches going down through time to the Roman period were just what Darwin wanted. He spent his evenings with Farrer in the pits, after the men had gone home, measuring the depth of the black worm tilth and the intervening layers of stones and earth, all the way down to the broken mortar and tessellated pavement at the bottom with undisturbed subsoil underneath. Calculating backwards through the centuries, he computed how much earth had been deposited by worms since the pavement had lain on the surface, a variant of the technique he had often used in working out the age of geological deposits. Even so, he was cautious, no doubt remembering the miscalculations he had made when working out the age of the Weald. He asked George to go through the figures. The net result was that he estimated that the ruins were covered at the rate of one inch every twelve years. Worm activity alone, Darwin told Farrer triumphantly, had submerged the villa so completely that no one knew it was there. Farrer agreed to keep an eye out for any new earthworm movement under the Roman pavement for the next six weeks or so. “I cannot remember a more delightful week than the last,” Darwin wrote in thanks.

  These home-based activities suited him exactly—slow, undemanding, and sufficiently interesting to keep him absorbed. In retrospect, it is plain that he had become utterly fixed in his own home to the extent that even his scientific imagination could not help but turn inwards towards it. Having exploited his garden, transformed his house into a factory for theories, and turned his growing children into facts, he now looked downwards, into the very earth he walked on. His science in this regard had come to be absolutely of the place, an expression of himself, of his personality and aspirations, now quite distinct from any comparable researches undertaken in biology by friends such as Huxley or Hooker. Whereas Hooker’s botanical endeavours were at heart fixed in a colonial, taxonomic enterprise, in which he evidently found inspiration and motivation from world-wide imperial motifs, Darwin had progressively reduced his gaze from large to small, making his own surroundings the centrepiece of his intellectual project. Whereas Huxley, or Anton Dohrn, might study annelids and ascidians as indications of the ancestral form of the first possible vertebrate in evolutionary history, and make sustained laboratory inquiries into annelid embryology and physiology, Darwin wished to know how many worms—equally members of the annelid family—were working away under his lawn. To be sure, this was the classic natural history approach that had characterised his work for decades. But it was also the distinctive feature that he brought to his individual scientific activities.

  Every now and then, worms gave way to other concerns. William announced that he wanted to marry Sara Sedgwick, the younger sister of Susan Norton, the wife of Darwin’s friend Charles Eliot Norton of Massachusetts. Darwin and Emma liked the Nortons very much, and Sara suited William well. For some reason the engagement was to be kept secret, at least for a month or two, and Darwin smiled to see how smoothly Emma could lie when required. “You ought to have seen your mother,” he said conspiratorially to Henrietta. “She looked as if she had committed a murder, and told a fib about Sara going back to America with the most innocent face.” The couple married in November 1877, a lasting, although childless, union.

  That same November, Darwin was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws (LL.D.) from Cambridge University, his alma mater. George was the first to tell him the news, writing directly from Trinity College with the result of the vote. Darwin accepted the honour with alacrity—he valued it highly, probably more than any other in his lifetime. As George told it, the voting was much more straightforward than the bungled affair at Oxford. Edward Atkinson, the vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, was a proponent of scientific advance and proud to announce both the opening of the Cavendish Laboratory for physics and Darwin’s election in the same year. The resolution passed easily.

  The degree was conferred at a special ceremony held for Darwin alone on Saturday 17 November 1877 in the Senate House in Cambridge. At first Emma doubted whether Darwin would cope with the ceremony, a two-hour haul topped off with a procession. He would be decked out in heavy red robes, followed by a deal of bowing and smiling to be got through. She underestimated her man. He was perfectly capable of effort when it was needed. “I thought he would be overcome, but he was quite stout and smiling.”6

  However, they were astounded by the noise. The Senate House was crammed with members of the university and their ladies, as the Cambridge Chronicle noted. Darwin’s sons were there too, George, Horace, and Francis. The gallery throbbed with undergraduates cheering and shouting. As soon as Darwin appeared in his robes, a stuffed monkey was dangled from the ceiling dressed in a miniature degree gown and mortar-board.

  His appearance was the signal for a flattering ovation and partial silence had scarcely ensued when cheers were given for “the primeval man.” … A couple of cords stretched from either gallery now became visible and presently there were affixed to them the effigy of a monkey in Academicals and an object to illustrate the “missing link” hung over Darwin’s head.7

  When the words could be heard above the rumpus, the Latin oration conferring his degree was elegantly incomprehensible. Darwin asked George to send him the Cambridge newspapers afterwards in case a translation appeared. All his works in biology and geology were mentioned, albeit in Latin, from “all that flies, or swims, or creeps” to the “tiny tendrils of the vine.” The weekend closed with a sociable lunch hosted by George in his rooms in Trinity. “J. W. Clarke not pleasant,” Emma said of the zoology department’s superintendent, “but he did me a good turn as I followed his lead in tasting Gallantine which is v. superior.… Now we are expecting F. Galton & Fawcett for an evening call & we mean to wind up by Trinity chapel—which I can’t believe F. will be up to. F. has been thoroughly pleased by the cordiality of everyone.”8 Whether by design or oversight, they missed the Sunday-morning sermon in Great St. Mary’s in which Dr. Wordsworth, the university preacher, reminded his congregation to approach the facts of nature in a properly reverential spirit.

  The irony of a university full of ordained fellows and teachers honouring Darwin did not go completely unnoticed. An editorial in the Rock, an Anglican journal, commented, “No doubt the affair has its ludicrous side, though a believer will scarcely regard the honour paid to the apostle of evolution as by any means a laughing matter.” The Manchester Weekly Times and Examiner was more urbane.

  Mr. Darwin has made considerable havoc in the groundwork of Christianity.… I can only wonder how the Cambridge Doctors of Divinity and official
guardians of orthodoxy will manage to square accounts with Mr. Darwin. Perhaps it is believed that a niche may be found for him in some sequestered corner of the Christian fabric.9

  By separating the man from his theory it evidently proved possible for Cambridge University, and then nearly all elements of the British establishment over the next several decades, to greet the new regime of evolutionary biology with relative equanimity. Even the Church of England acknowledged Darwin’s personal integrity and quest for truth. Perhaps it was merely traditional British hypocrisy, or the spirit of compromise and adaptability in the face of what increasingly appeared to be a scientific truth. Nevertheless, by heaping personal honours on Darwin’s head, by praising his individual qualities of probity, commitment, decency, and modesty, the nation could glory in celebration without having to make any judgement on evolution at all.