Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  Many of the speakers went on to defend vivisection in their addresses to the congress, especially Virchow, and the delegates adopted a resolution supporting the use of vivisection with humanitarian control. Darwin did not attend any of the events after that first reception, presumably having served the purpose merely by being present. He therefore did not feature in the remarkable composite photograph of the delegates taken by Herbert Barraud; nor did he appear in the enormous oil painting of Angela Burdett-Coutts’s garden party, at which Europe’s greatest living scientists were depicted standing around somewhat awkwardly in conversational groups on the grass.89 Most of his friends, correspondents, and enemies were there. For one last time, Darwin’s absence was palpable.

  He continued to support the vivisectionist cause. A few months later he sent money to help defend David Ferrier, an experimentalist who was unexpectedly prosecuted for vivisecting without a license. This notorious court case was initiated by Frances Power Cobbe and was regarded by Darwin and others as jeopardising Ferrier’s important work on the functions of the brain. A Science Defence Fund was subsequently set up to assist physiologists confronted by similar circumstances, and Thomas Lauder Brunton asked Darwin if he would serve as first president of this fund. Although Darwin declined, he kept abreast of developments.

  IX

  Despite all these manifest signs of public approbation, the melancholy persisted. “My life is like clock-work, working away at what little I can do more in science,” he said. He was in the grip of a vision of time as powerful and as bleak as anything in Victorian culture. A pensive air underpinned the portrait of him made by John Collier in July 1881.

  The commission was undertaken at the request of the Linnean Society. To the extent that he ever welcomed such commitments, Darwin was content to agree because he felt loyal towards the Linnean, the framework for his identity as a biologist. He seems not to have given a moment’s thought to the possibility that the Linnean Society, as perhaps the Cambridge Philosophical Society before, was interested not merely in commemorating his long association with the body but also in appropriating his image as cultural capital. The purpose of this picture—the place where it was to hang and the message it was to convey to assembled fellows—was an essential part of the project.90

  Moreover, Darwin liked “Jack” Collier. He was Huxley’s son-in-law, a professed unbeliever and a member of the well-financed, forward-looking, artistic London set. Collier had married Huxley’s second daughter, Marian (“Mady), who herself drew an attractive pencil sketch of Darwin in 1878.91 The portrait to be painted by her husband was financed by subscriptions from the Linnean fellows.

  Collier visited Down House twice for sittings, bringing Marian with him. He eschewed any scientific props, portraying Darwin unencumbered by any signs of earthly, practical existence, a man whose claim to greatness rested in his intellect. He posed him as if he were about to set off on his daily walk, dressed in his outdoor cape, hat in hand, a simple, stately, benevolent figure gazing into the complexities of nature and seeing further than most. His white hair, ample beard, and furrowed brow gave him the appearance of a saint, even of a deity. The younger members of the family were pleased. Collier had created an icon of solitude and wisdom. But as was becoming customary, it did not appeal to Emma, who commented that the “likeness is so indefinite.”

  Emma’s dealings with Marian Huxley were another matter. Marian was one of the new breed of women, confident in her own abilities and the future.

  Marian … does not make her fortune here. She ought to have been improved by marrying so nice a man—her manner is so indifferent & wanting in respect that Bessy can hardly bring herself to call her Marian. My only aim is to be just civil enough to prevent her Jack finding out how little we like her. e.g. she sat at 5 o’clock tea yesterday reading her newspaper without even looking off to drink her tea. It is clear we need never invite her again.92

  The sittings (the “standings”) tired Darwin, so Jackson the butler took over. He modelled for Collier, standing on a box dressed in Darwin’s cape to get the height and drape. He chatted brightly to Collier. “Do you know Sir, I believe some people don’t think Mr Darwin good looking; but we can’t see that at all.” At least three copies were made of this portrait, including one for the Darwin family that was afterwards given to the National Portrait Gallery in London.93 The original hangs in the Linnean Society. “I shall be proud some day to see myself suspended at the Linnean Society,” said Darwin as he congratulated the artist.

  X

  Darwin’s brother Erasmus died in August 1881, a sad time for them all. Erasmus had played a central part in Darwin’s life—witty, affectionate, and hospitable, a generous host in London, a favourite guest at weekend parties, on family holidays, and outings, an incorrigible gossip whose letters provided the cement of the family circle. “Caroline had a horrid story about a bilberry tart too dreadful to repeat and I am afraid they all laughed instead of sympathising,” he would report whimsically. He wrote about his daily life in the metropolis, his invalidism, his casual detachment.

  One by one, his relatives asked each other whether Erasmus had died a lonely death. They all knew he was not a Christian believer. “It isn’t my nature to look at the best side of things,” he had said in 1878, a self-judgement that none of his relatives recognised. His attitude to life was more engaging, warmer than that. They were pleased at least that he had not faced death alone. His and Darwin’s remaining sister, Caroline, had struggled up to town to sit with him for a few days before returning home. Then his dearest friend, Fanny Wedgwood, probably his one true love, came and stayed till the end, accompanied by her daughter Effie and Henrietta Litchfield. The love that the younger set held for him was moving in its simplicity. William Darwin said he seemed “much more than an uncle.” Indeed, it is possible that they found in Erasmus an attractive alternative to their father, the other side of Darwin’s personality, a man with endless time and loving curiosity about their developing lives, someone who was not incessantly preoccupied with work. Henrietta chose to live close to Erasmus and was with him more or less to the end. His wry humour lived on, making fun of himself and the family claims to fame. He had been the instigator of a private petition that did the rounds of Darwins and Wedgwoods for signature, requesting Effie Farrer to write letters that someone was able to read. Or he had amused them with frivolous plans to spend the winter in Algeria, “utterly averse to anything beyond sitting in the sun on my balcony”—frivolous only because they knew he would never get up sufficient energy to go there. He was alert to his brother Charles’s achievement. “I wrote you a very pretty note on Saturday & tore it up on Sunday,” he told Effie just before his death, “and perhaps this will be torn up tomorrow but if it survives that will be proof that it is the fittest.”

  At Erasmus’s death, Darwin recalled the “touching patience & sweetness of his nature.” Writing to Hooker, he said, “He always appeared to me the most pleasant and clearest headed man, whom I have ever known. London will seem a strange place to me without his presence.” Shortly afterwards, he was pained to see Thomas Carlyle’s dismissive remarks about Erasmus, in which Carlyle patronisingly suggested that he had been “doomed to silence and patient idleness.” Julia Wedgwood rose to defend Erasmus in the Spectator. At home, Darwin pulled out the manuscript copy of his autobiography to add the comment that Carlyle’s account had, in his opinion, “little truth and no merit.”94

  The burial was at Downe. Darwin refused to have the village vicar, George Ffinden, officiate and shipped in his cousin John Wedgwood, the same cousin who had conducted the marriage service for him and Emma long ago at Maer. This was the last time Darwin attended church except for his own funeral. Francis remembered his look most distinctly, as he stood in the churchyard caught in an unseasonal scattering of snow, wrapped in his long black cloak, “with a grave look of sad reverie.” It was 1 September 1881, “bitter cold.”

  Although undated, it seems likely that the final phot
ographs of Darwin date from this sadly meditative period. A photographer from the firm of Elliot and Fry came to Down House in person, probably Clarence E. Fry, the senior photographic partner. This was a change from Darwin’s usual practice of visiting a London studio as he had done several times in the late 1870s for new cartes de visite. Darwin posed outside, on the veranda, dressed in his cape and soft hat. Three studies, perhaps more, were the result. He looked sombre. Almost all that could be seen was his beard, his hat, and his eyes. The man as a physical presence had almost disappeared. All that was left was his mental powers.

  He published his final book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, in October 1881. “The subject may appear an insignificant one,” he wrote in the preface, half-defensive. But the principles behind the study were the primary creed of his scientific life—“small agencies and their accumulated effects.” He believed that the natural world was the result of constantly repeated small and accumulative actions, a lesson he had first learned when reading Lyell’s Principles of Geology on board the Beagle and had put to work ever since. His interpretation of South American geology had been based on Lyell’s vision of little-and-often, and his theory of coral reefs too, each polyp building on the skeletons of other polyps, every individual contributing its remains to the growing reef. Most notably, he had applied the idea of gradual accumulative change to the origin of species, believing that the preservation of a constant procession of minor adaptations in individuals would lead to the transformation of living beings. His work on barnacles, plants, and pigeons all supported the point. No one, not even Lyell himself, or any of Darwin’s closest friends and supporters, accepted as ardently as Darwin that the book of nature was about the accumulative powers of the small.

  For this volume he called personally at Murray’s with the manuscript in his hands, uncertain whether the firm would find it worth publishing. Murray recalled the conversation with a certain humour. “Here is a work which has occupied me for many years and interested me much. I fear the subject of it will not attract the public, but will you publish it for me?” Darwin apparently said. “It always gives me great pleasure and hope to hear an author speak of his work thus. What is the subject?” Murray replied. “Earthworms,” said Darwin.95

  Despite his fears, it was by far his most popular volume, selling widely from the day it was published, in greater numbers and at a faster speed than even The Expression of the Emotions had done. A day or two after publication Murray exclaimed, “3500 Worms!!”96 The subject matter captured the general imagination. For months afterwards, Darwin received letters from people wishing to add to his quaint and curious enterprise. “I am driven almost frantic by the number of letters about worms; but amidst much rubbish there are some good facts & suggestions,” he sighed.97 A number of contemporaries saw the pathos in Darwin’s magnificent obsession. “I must own I had always looked on worms as amongst the most helpless and unintelligent members of the creation; and am amazed to find that they have a domestic life and public duties!” said Hooker. One caricature by Linley Sambourne in Punch depicted Darwin as the creator of life, contemplating the evolutionary cycle from worm right around again to worm, portraying mankind’s inevitable return to the earth that bred him. Sambourne sent this picture and his respects to Darwin. Leslie Stephen praised the book for Darwin’s tenderness towards insignificant creatures. Moncure Conway took a theological view, speaking of “our fellow worms” in the Index of 1881, declaring that the worm is the resurrection and the life.98

  XI

  Darwin slowed down considerably over the following months. Family matters occupied his mind. In December, Horace and Ida presented him with a second grandchild, this one to be called Erasmus. Although the news was welcome, Darwin felt too fatigued to travel to Cambridge to see the baby, much preferring to idle on the sofa. He and William took some time to sort out the family’s financial affairs, and around now he put his will into final order, making sure to leave a personal gift of £1,000 each to Hooker and Huxley, “as a slight memorial of my lifelong affection and respect.” Somewhat surprisingly, he did not do the same for Wallace.

  His weak pulse induced Emma to call in Dr. Andrew Clark, “but he did not take a serious view of it.” Privately, Clark warned Emma that Darwin showed signs of encroaching weakness of the heart. This was made clear by a frightening incident at George Romanes’s house. During a visit to London early in December 1881, Darwin experienced a sudden spasm on Romanes’s doorstep, identified by him afterwards as heart pains of the kind that came to plague him. Again, Clark examined him. “Dr. A. Clark finds that my heart is perfectly right, & that the pain & rapid intermittent pain, must have been only some indirect mischief,” he reported with relief.

  Five-year-old Bernard was an agreeable distraction. Darwin and Bernard referred to each other familiarly as “Baba” and “Abbadubba,” and each looked forward to their daily conversations, the young and old meeting on common ground. Francis appreciated the intimacy between them.

  His love and goodness towards Bernard “Abbadubba” as he called him were great. He often used to say he never saw such a contented child as Dubba; and often spoke of the pleasure it was to him to see his little face opposite to him at dinner; they used to talk about liking brown sugar better than white &c., the result being “We always agree don’t we Abbadubba”—Dubba had so many adorers that my father didn’t get him to himself much; one ceremony that took place every day was showing “Baba” how big a bit of chocolate he had got. This was at 3 o’clock when my father was lying down upstairs—and Dubba used to run from the chocolate box across to the sofa.99

  Bernard’s high spirits reverberated through the family. He joined his grandfather for walks around the garden, drew soldiers as quietly as he could on the floor in Darwin’s study, jumped down the stairs in threes and fours, and held Darwin’s hand in self-important splendour on the lawn when the Coal Club band came for its annual performance. He danced with excitement on top of the garden wall when a traction engine trundled round the bend in the road. “They had a delightful expedition all the way to Cudham,” said Emma that winter. “He talked all the way when he was not singing, and had to be put down whenever they came to a frozen puddle to stamp upon it.” She told Henrietta that “Bernard is at the stage of wanting endless stories or rather talkings, & I find myself very soon run dry—tho’ he is very merciful in wanting the same story 40 times.”100 Encouraged by Darwin, he raced his tricycle up and down the long gravel path while the old man timed him on his pocket watch. The sliding board for the stairs, the board that the previous generation had used on rainy days when they were children in the 1850s, mysteriously reemerged from the cupboard where Parslow had stowed it.

  In the evenings, when Bernard had gone to bed, Emma would play the piano for Darwin, especially when Henrietta and her husband were visiting. Sometimes Francis, Richard Litchfield, and Emma would play a trio together, “a little tootling” she called it. These trios were engagingly amateur in performance, Litchfield taking the violin part on his concertina, and Frank the violoncello on his bassoon, “and thus they played a great many of the Mozart and Haydn trios and slow movements out of Beethoven.”101

  Darwin continued to plan experiments and interest himself in the house and grounds. Late in 1881 he purchased a strip of land behind the hothouse to add to the garden. He intended to extend the orchard and lay down a tennis court, although a makeshift grass court was probably already marked out. The sons remembered that Darwin would sometimes walk down that way en route to the Sandwalk and knock back stray tennis balls with the handle of his stick. They said he was predictable in his complaints about the “idiotic” system of tennis scoring, “maintaining it was all affectation marking 15, 30, 40 instead of 1, 2, 3.” Pausing to contemplate the freshly exposed back of this garden wall, Darwin also mapped out in his head a plan for a new boiler-room for the hothouse and discussed with Francis the possibility of a building without windows that appears to have been m
eant as a dark-room for growing experimental plants. This was not put into use until after his death.

  Tweaked into idle new avenues of thought, he reopened a handful of unfinished botanical investigations. One of these involved the condition he called bloom. This bloom could be seen in the powdery complexion of fresh-picked fruit, say a plum, which Darwin believed was an adaptation to reduce the effects of dehydration. “It is a really pretty sight to put a pod of the common pea, or a raspberry, into water,” he said enthusiastically “They appear as if encased in thin glass.” He thought bloom was related in an evolutionary manner to the waxy covering that protected plants from salt spray, mud, and rain. So he pestered William Thiselton Dyer at Kew for specimens of seaside species and heartlessly stripped the leaves of their surface coverings, burned holes in them by watering them in the sunshine, immersed them in salt water, and inflicted any other “devastation” he could devise.

  From time to time he looked inquiringly at the other end of plants. He immersed roots in carbonate of ammonia to examine the rate of cellular uptake. “My dear Mr. Vines,” he wrote understandingly to a new contact at Cambridge, the botanist Sydney Vines, “I fear that you will be utterly tired of me and my roots.” Or he tried to identify the reasons for the daily opening and closing of leaves and flowers. He liked to refer to the closing movement as “sleep,” although he soon decided that it was actually an adaptive response related to self-preservation from light. He put together some cumbersome wooden gadgets with rotating arms to catch them at it. At night he placed a succession of valuable pot-plants on the lawn with their leaves tied together so that they could not move. “We have killed or badly injured a multitude of plants,” he said remorsefully. He sacrificed a favourite Oxalis sensitiva to this work before guiltily remembering that it came from Kew.