Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  These idiosyncratic projects diverted his attention from his declining health. Even so, he mused on the life he had spent. Leonard Darwin recorded one moment when this feeling almost lay solidly in the air.

  My father, my sister and I were walking … on a beautiful sunny evening when the charm of the quiet scenery was, I am sure, affecting his mind. At all events, in reply to something which my sister had said, he declared that if he had to live his life over again he would make it a rule to let no day pass without reading a few lines of poetry. Then he quietly added that he wished he had “not let his mind go to rot so.”102

  Emma often spent the early afternoons and evenings reading aloud to him. Mudie’s Circulating Library kept them well supplied with fiction and memoirs, and a letter of hers written in 1879 indicates that they kept relatively abreast of contemporary literature. After lunch, Darwin rested and smoked a cigarette while she read to him from the text of the day.

  We have begun to read aloud “The Europeans” a very pleasant contrast to a very painful but powerful novel of Trollope’s “An eye for an eye” which we have just finished. Mr James is rather too subtle for my taste & I often have to stop to consider what he means.

  Otherwise, she would throw two games of backgammon with him, a nightly ritual maintained through thick and thin. The board was bound in leather to look as if it were a large book, and labelled on the spine “History of North America.” Darwin remained competitive to the end. His desire to win even at backgammon was almost comic. “Bang your bones” or “Confound the woman” he would exclaim if things were going badly with him. “Pray give our very kind remembrances to Mrs. Gray,” he once wrote to Asa Gray. “I know that she likes to hear men boasting, it refreshes them so much. Now the tally with my wife in backgammon stands thus: she, poor creature, has won only 2490 games, whilst I have won, hurrah hurrah 2795 games!”103

  During these listless days, Emma modified her routine to suit him best. It worried her that Darwin was becoming frail, taking only an egg for an early supper with Bernard, and retiring soon afterwards to bed. “I am fairly well,” he wrote to Wallace, “but always feel half dead with fatigue.” Francis was quick to catch the elegaic mood. “It was one of his many bits of clocklike regularity that he might be heard blowing his nose with a very loud sound at 10.30 every night as he undressed in his study which he used as a dressing room. His long bright coloured dressing gown was a familiar sight as he went slowly up to bed with his slow tired step.”104 Darwin took to wearing pince-nez for reading, although these kept getting lost in his waistcoat. He never went deaf, said the sons. Emma stayed close, apprehensive that any day might be his last. “Looked out of window,” she recorded in her diary on one particularly bad morning, as if this was an achievement of note. When she tended him at night he said, “It is almost worth while to be sick to be nursed by you.”

  During my father’s last years her whole day was planned out to suit him [reported Henrietta], to be ready for reading aloud to him, to go his walks with him, and to be constantly at hand to alleviate his daily discomforts.… My mother would, when her strength and the weather allowed, go with him round the “sand-walk.”105

  He relapsed in February and March 1882 with heart pains. Emma told Henrietta, “The 2 walks he took brought on faintness & some pain about the heart—so we were greatly rejoiced when Dr Clark examined him carefully & pronounced the heart quite sound. He attributes all this discomfort to eczema which will not come out.” Yet he depended on Emma completely, unwilling to walk far from the house in case the pains, or “a fit of his dazzling,” would seize him, unable to tolerate visitors except extremely close family friends. Instead, he loitered with his wife on the veranda or, as the spring began, sat with her in the orchard, admiring the crocuses and listening to birdsong.

  Four doctors were in attendance during these months, an unnecessarily large number but characteristic of Darwin’s lifelong multiple relationship with the medical profession. Andrew Clark came to see him from London, although the Darwins disliked interrupting his busy practice to call him down. Clark put him into the combined hands of Norman Moore of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and C. H. Allfrey of St. Mary Cray, a nearby village. Shortly after, Dr. Walter Moxon, a physician from Guy’s Hospital, was brought in. Darwin’s mind was absolutely clear, his sense of humour intact. On one occasion when Emma told him off for interrupting her, and then asked Bernard rather too abruptly to ring the servant’s bell, he laughed. “Yes, look sharp about it, Mammy is not to be trifled with when she is in this humour, I can tell you.” Here and there, he made some small observation in the garden or greenhouse, his mind still dwelling on roots and leaves. Two days before his death he fretted in the house until he was allowed to note the results of one of Francis’s experiments on bloom.

  But he was fading. He died on the afternoon of 19 April 1882, after sinking very low for two or three days beforehand and suffering what Emma called “fatal attack” at midnight on the 18th. There was no deathbed conversion, no famous last words.106 “I am not the least afraid to die,” he apparently murmured to Emma. “Remember what a good wife you have been.”107 Allfrey signed the death certificate giving “Angina Pectoris Syncope” as the cause of death, the gradual ceasing of the heart. He was seventy-three.

  XII

  Before the day was through, John Lewis creaked up the road with a coffin on his cart and laid Darwin out, as the old country tradition required. Emma knew that Darwin expected to be buried in Downe churchyard, alongside Erasmus and the Darwins’ two dead babies, “the sweetest place on earth,” he had once remarked to Hooker. He no doubt imagined that Emma would be buried there in the future. He had made his life, and his books, on that spot. But science claimed him, as it always had. News of his death went directly from Francis Darwin that evening to Huxley, Hooker, Galton, and the rest. The next day Galton hurried to William Spottiswoode, the president of the Royal Society, to request that Darwin should be interred in Westminster Abbey, as a fitting memorial for a great man.

  Dying was the most political thing Darwin could have done. As Huxley and others were aware, to bury him in Westminster Abbey would celebrate both the man and the naturalistic, law-governed science that he, and each member of the Darwinian circle, had striven, in his way, to establish. Such an accolade suited Huxley down to the ground. His affection and admiration for his friend meshed seamlessly with elevated regard for modern science. Before long Lubbock was able to send to the dean of Westminster a document stating that “it would be acceptable to a very large number of our countrymen of all classes and opinions that our illustrious countryman, Mr. Darwin, should be buried in Westminster Abbey.” Twenty members of Parliament had signed it. Lubbock was confident that Dr. Bradley (the dean), and Gladstone (the prime minister) would give their consent.

  Hardly given time to grieve, Darwin’s family were initially reluctant to accept this request, conscious not only of Darwin’s wishes but also sensitive to the charge that they might be seeking for him the publicity that he had avoided in life. “It gave us all a pang not to have him rest quietly by Eras.,” Emma said to Fanny Wedgwood. “But William felt strongly, and on reflection I did also, that his gracious and grateful nature wd. have wished to accept the acknowledgement of what he had done.” Several people in the village expressed reluctance for other reasons. The landlord of the George Inn thought a grave in the village would have helped local business by bringing sightseers. “There was great disappointment in Down that he was not buried there,” agreed Parslow. “He loved the place and we think he would rather have rested there had he been consulted.”108 Nonetheless the family accepted.

  The funeral at Westminster Abbey was held on Wednesday 26 April, a week after Darwin’s death. The ceremony was overwhelming in size and content, a chance for science to show its strength as well as render formal acknowledgement of Darwin’s place in history. The original Kent coffin was changed for a sumptuous velvet-draped affair. Philosophers, scientists, naturalists, admirals, mu
seum superintendents, and civic dignitaries attended, “together with a host of lay celebrities,” all keen to pay their last respects to the man and the achievement. There were a few absences—Gladstone was busy in Downing Street (“off to Windsor at 5. Grand dinner in the Waterloo gallery”), and the Archbishop of Canterbury was indisposed.109 It is not known how far these may have been tactical.

  Even so, among the ceremonial trappings the domestic character of Darwin’s work briefly showed its face. Completely unself-conscious, his eldest son, William, felt a draught on his bald head after removing his hat. “So he put his black gloves to balance on the top of his skull, and sat like that all through the service with the eyes of the nation upon him.”110 Incognito among the “dense throng of mourners, amongst whom were men whose names are as household words in European scientific circles,” were his servants Parslow and Jackson, and Mrs. Evans the cook.

  “Happy is the man that findeth wisdom and getteth understanding,” sang the choir from Proverbs 3. Two dukes and an earl were among the men who carried his coffin to the grave—the Duke of Argyll, the Duke of Devonshire, and the Earl of Derby—accompanied by the American ambassador, J. Russell Lowell, and William Spottiswoode, representing English science as president of the Royal Society. The other pall-bearers were equally eminent, the four men whose lives had intertwined so intimately with his own and whose rise to public position had matched the growing acceptance of his theories, Hooker, Wallace, Huxley, and Lubbock. Far away in America, Asa Gray could only write to Julia Wedgwood to say Darwin’s death was “like the annihilation of a good bit of what is left of my own life.”

  Darwin’s grave was in the nave, near Sir John Herschel and Isaac Newton, an honourable place but not as close to Lyell as Emma had hoped. The stone was inscribed with his name and dates, and only later did the Royal Society organise a fund to add a bronze tablet that described his contribution to science. As the Pall Mall Gazette declared, well-wishers believed they were laying there “the greatest Englishman since Newton,” one who had given “the same stir, the same direction to all that is most characteristic in the intellectual energy of the nineteenth century, as did Locke and Newton in the eighteenth.” No one, said the Times, has “wielded a power over men and their intelligences more complete than that which for the last twenty-three years has emanated from a simple country house in Kent.”111

  Emma remained at home. Unexpectedly, Francis had to put down Darwin’s dog Polly a few days afterwards, and he buried her under the Kentish Beauty apple tree in the orchard.

  And Darwin himself slipped into legend.

  Notes

  Books and articles are cited in author-date form, and a full listing of these is in the Bibliography. Some standard sources are abbreviated as short titles, e.g., Correspondence, Life and Letters, etc. The full reference is given below. These are also listed alphabetically in the Bibliography, once under the abbreviated title and again under the author’s or editor’s name.

  Darwin’s books and papers are for the most part held in the Manuscripts Room, Cambridge University Library. The collection is subdivided and catalogued in various ways. Since this volume was begun, an extensive programme of renumbering has taken place and new items have been acquired, in particular the Down House Manuscripts on deposit from English Heritage. For clarity I have converted old call numbers into new numbers. Some discrepancies may, however, arise. The abbreviation DAR is the prefix for all Darwin items. Where other material from Cambridge University Library is cited I have tried to make the distinction clear. In general, I have cited published sources for letters. Otherwise, the recipient or sender and the conjectured date of unpublished letters are given with the name of their repository. A complete listing of Darwin’s correspondence is given in Calendar (see below).

  Abbreviations

  Autobiography: Nora Barlow, ed. 1958. The autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882, with original omissions restored. London: Collins.

  Calendar: Frederick H. Burkhardt, Sydney Smith, et al., eds. 1994. Calendar of the correspondence of Charles Darwin, rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Collected papers: Paul H. Barrett, ed. 1977. The collected papers of Charles Darwin. 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  Correspondence: Frederick H. Burkhardt, Sydney Smith, et al., eds. 1983–2001. The correspondence of Charles Darwin. Vols. 1–12 (1821–64). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  DAR: Darwin manuscript collection, Cambridge University Library.

  Descent: Charles R. Darwin. 1871. The descent of man and selection in relation to sex. 2 vols. Facsimile ed. with an introduction by John T. Bonner and R. M. May. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981.

  Earthworms: Charles R. Darwin. 1881. The formation of vegetable mould through the action of worms, with observations on their habits. London.

  Emma Darwin: Henrietta E. Litchfield, ed. 1904. Emma Darwin, wife of Charles Darwin: a century of family letters. 2 vols. Cambridge: Privately printed.

  Expression: Charles R. Darwin. 1872. The expression of the emotions in man and animals. Reprint ed. with an introduction, afterword, and commentaries by Paul Ekman. London: HarperCollins, 1998.

  Journal: Gavin De Beer, ed. 1959. Darwin’s Journal. Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History) Historical Series 2:1–21.

  Journal of researches: Charles R. Darwin. 1845. Journal of researches. 2nd ed. London. Reprinted as The voyage of the Beagle, edited by H. G. Cannon. London: J. M. Dent, 1959.

  Life and Letters: Francis Darwin, ed. 1887. The life and letters of Charles Darwin. 3 vols. London.

  More letters: Francis Darwin and A. C. Seward, eds. 1903. More letters of Charles Darwin: a record of his work in a series of hitherto unpublished letters. 2 vols. London: John Murray.

  Natural Selection: Robert C. Stauffer, ed. 1975. Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection, being the second part of his big species book written from 1856 to 1858. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Notebooks: Paul H. Barrett et al., eds. 1987. Charles Darwin’s notebooks, 1836–1844: geology, transmutation of species, metaphysical enquiries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Orchids: Charles R. Darwin. 1877c. The various contrivances by which orchids are fertilised by insects. 2nd ed. Revised with a new foreword by Michael Ghiselin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

  Origin: Charles R. Darwin. 1859. On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. London. Facsimile edition with an introduction by Ernst Mayr. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964.

  Variation: Charles R. Darwin. 1868. The variation of animals and plants under domestication. 2 vols. London. Facsimile edition with new foreword by Harriet Ritvo. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

  CHAPTER 1: STORMY WATERS

  1. Once a Week, 21 January 1860, p. 67. Victorian Britain is characterised in Houghton 1957, Briggs 1959, Appleman et al. 1959, Himmlefarb 1959, Burn 1964, Burrow 1966, Perkin 1969, Hobsbawn 1975, Hilton 1988, Collini 1991, Hoppen 1998, and Cannadine 1999.

  2. Life and Letters 1:318. See also Stecher 1961.

  3. Described in Wedgwood and Wedgwood 1980 and partly in Arbuckle 1983. See also Annan 1955, Cannon 1964, and L. Stone and Stone 1986.

  4. Life and Letters 2:288.

  5. Wedgwood and Wedgwood 1980, p. 334. On Darwin’s place in the rural community, see Howarth and Howarth 1933, Atkins 1974, Moore 1985a, and Neve 1993. More generally on the bourgeois experience, see Gay 1984–88 and F. Thompson 1988.

  6. Darwin’s long manuscript is transcribed in Stauffer 1975. The quotation comes from Burkhardt and Smith et al., The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, abbreviated here as Correspondence. See Correspondence 6:265. Darwin’s formulation of the theory of evolution by natural selection has been discussed by a large number of scholars, from which see Limoges 1970, Barrett et al. 1987, Ospovat 1981, Kohn 1989, Hodge 1985, R. Young 1985, and Browne 1983 and 1995. Mu
ch of the literature is summarised in Oldroyd 1984, Kohn 1985a, Lenoir 1987, Bowler 1989a, and Bohlin 1991.

  7. Biographies of note are by Brent 1981, Bowlby 1990, Bowler 1990, and Desmond and Moore 1991. Others include West 1937, Keith 1955, Himmelfarb 1959, and Fleming 1969. How Darwin has fared in biographer’s hands is discussed in part by Churchill 1982. For scientific biography as a genre see the essays in Shortland and Yeo 1996. More generally, see Epstein 1987 and 1991, and Josselson and Lieblich 1995.

  8. From a large literature, see Irvine 1955, Eisley 1961, Ruse 1979, Bowler 1988 and 1989a, Greene 1991 and 1996, otherwise summarised and discussed in Kohn 1985a. For the wider implications see Oldroyd and Langham 1983, Moore 1989, Amigoni and Wallace 1995, and Numbers and Stenhouse 1999.

  9. Correspondence 8:277.

  10. The letters known to be in existence today are listed in Burkhardt and Smith et al., Calendar of the correspondence of Charles Darwin, abbreviated here as Calendar. Darwin’s German correspondence is listed by Junker and Richmond 1996. See also Carroll 1976. Darwin’s habits relating to his correspondence is in Life and Letters 1:119–21. An evaluation is given by Moore 1985b. For the role of place in a writer’s work see especially Ophir and Shapin 1991, Shapin 1991, and Agar and Smith 1998, and more generally Marsh 1993.

  11. Post Office Directory of the Five Home Counties, Kent, 1870.

  12. Raverat 1952, p. 206. Darwin’s accounts are in two series, his Classed Account Books and his Account Books, Down House Archives, arranged by year.

  13. Hill 1862, p. 465, Perry 1992. Reflections on the impact of correspondence in society are in Chartier et al. 1997.

  14. Quoted from Darwin and Wallace 1858. The original essay has not survived. See also Correspondence 7:517.