In her lengthy reply three days later Isabella blamed her mean hypocrite of a husband, explaining that she turned to her journal as a ‘resource’ in her loneliness. ‘What was my consolation?’ she asked, answering, ‘solitude & my pen’. ‘I dipped my pen but too often in the fairy ink of poesy; – the true & actual, the shadowy & the visionary were too often blended – I had the fatal gift – more curse than boon of giving “to airy nothings, a local habitation and a name”.’113 She agreed with Combe that the only way to repair the damage to Dr Lane was to admit that she was the ‘victim temporarily of my own fancies & delusions’ and that she had written down as facts ‘the wildest imaginings of a mind exhausted with the tyranny of long years’.114 Since she was not permitted to testify, however, these admissions did not come to court and the case was left to rest on the hope that the divorce court judges would accept that the apparently incriminating journal entries were mere fantasy. As the proceedings unfolded on the hottest days of June it became clear that the case of Robinson v. Robinson and Lane required to be adjourned while the judges took further advice on the legal questions raised by its anomalies.
Darwin, liking and trusting Lane, and being adamant that he was not a charlatan – after all, hydropathy had offered Darwin some relief from his chronic symptoms over the years, where orthodox medicine had failed – expressed surprise and sorrow on reading about the case. He wrote to W.D. Fox on 24 June 1858, as the final judgment was awaited, saying that all the people he had asked about the story ‘think that Dr L is probably innocent’. He cites in favour of this view the ‘absence of all corroborative evidence’ and ‘the unparalleled fact of a woman detailing her own adultery, which seems to me more improbable than inventing a story prompted by extreme sensuality or hallucination’. But he fears nonetheless that the case ‘will ruin him’, adding ‘I never heard a sensual expression from him.’115 Like everyone else, Darwin would have to wait until the case was resumed on 3 July. Meanwhile, he was coping with the greatest crisis of his own life.
Darwin’s dilemma
Having returned from his latest sojourn at Moor Park in early May 1858, Darwin was working hard at his manuscript, disappointed once more to find that all the good he felt the hydropathic treatment had done him had evaporated as soon as he got back to work. The health of his children worried him too. Etty was ill again, with inflammation of the throat.116 Darwin had sent her to Moor Park the previous summer, joining her himself for two weeks in June.117 He told Hooker then that ‘Dr Lane & wife & mother-in-law Lady Drysdale are some of the nicest people, I have ever met’.118 Not only did he like Lane better than the credulous James Gully, but the fact that his beloved 10-year-old daughter Annie had died in Gully’s establishment at Malvern in 1851 meant that he could not bear the thought of returning to a place with such sad memories.119 In October 1857 he described in a letter to W.D. Fox his anxiety about Etty and also his son Leonard, whose pulse was feeble and often irregular, ‘like three of our other children’. He found it ‘heart-breaking’, adding, ‘a man ought to be a bachelor, & care for no human being to be happy! or not to be wretched’.120 (Most of Darwin’s children, about whom he and Emma worried so much, were long-lived, not that Darwin could have foreseen this; Etty died in her eighties, and Leonard in his nineties.)
On Friday, 18 June, two days after the summer’s hottest day, Darwin wrote to his old friend and mentor Charles Lyell, beginning calmly enough:
Some year or so ago, you recommended me to read a paper by Wallace in the Annals, which had interested you & as I was writing to him, I knew this would please him much, so I told him. He has to day sent me the enclosed & asked me to forward it to you. It seems to me well worth reading. Your words have come true with a vengeance that I sh[oul]d be forestalled. You said this when I explained to you here very briefly my views of ‘Natural Selection’ depending on the Struggle for existence. I never saw a more striking coincidence. If Wallace had my M.S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as Heads of my Chapters.
Please return me the M.S. which he does not say he wishes me to publish; but I shall of course at once write & offer to send to any Journal. So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed. Though my Book, if it will ever have any value, will not be deteriorated; as all labour consists in the application of the theory.121
On reading this, Lyell, himself not lacking in authorial vanity, would understand Darwin’s despair. He would also notice the apparently casual mention in Darwin’s letter of the unassailable fact of his own precedence, and the underlying hope that because he had shown Lyell and Hooker previous parts of his written conclusions going back to 1842, he could, if required, prove that the concept of ‘natural selection’, as well as the phrase itself, was originally his. Darwin also points out (in his own favour) that ‘all the labour consists in the application of the theory’, the task he has been pursuing for years, whereas Wallace’s short piece consists of the idea itself, without the voluminous examples required to prove it. Wallace’s letter and its vital enclosure are now lost, though the latter has come down to posterity as a result of Lyell’s action on receiving this bombshell from his friend.122
Darwin waited anxiously for Lyell to reply and advise, for though he had not directly asked for Lyell’s help, he clearly hoped that it would be forthcoming, especially in relation to his remark about Wallace not having asked him to publish his piece and his own fair-minded assurance that he would ‘of course’ offer to send it to a journal for publication. Meanwhile he wrote to his son William, now eighteen and preparing to go to university in Cambridge, informing him about the habits of caterpillars, the progress of William’s moths and butterflies in a box at Down, and the news that ‘the poor old horse has cut his knee so badly that he never is likely to be good for anything’. He mentions Etty’s illness, but not, of course, his own trouble.123 On 24 June he wrote to W.D. Fox, expressing his belief in Edward Lane’s innocence of the charge of adultery and telling him that in addition to Etty’s illness, ‘last night our Baby commenced with Fever of some kind’.124 Charles Waring Darwin had been born in December 1856, when Emma was forty-eight.
Darwin wrote again to Lyell on 25 June, apologising for troubling him, and asking his opinion on what to do about Wallace; ‘I have entire confidence in your judgment & honour.’ He sets out his thoughts:
There is nothing in Wallace’s sketch which is not written out much fuller in my sketch copied in 1844, & read by Hooker some dozen years ago. About a year ago I sent a short sketch of which I have a copy of my views … to Asa Gray, so that I could most truly say & prove that I take nothing from Wallace. I sh[oul]d be extremely glad now to publish a sketch of my general views in about a dozen pages or so. But I cannot persuade myself that I can do so honourably. Wallace says nothing about publication … But as I had not intended to publish any sketch, can I do so honourably because Wallace has sent me an outline of his doctrine? I would far rather burn my whole book than that he or any man sh[oul]d think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit …
If I could honourably publish I would state that I was induced now to publish a sketch … from Wallace having sent me an outline of my general conclusions. We differ only, that I was led to my views from what artificial selection had done for domestic animals. I could send Wallace a copy of my letter to Asa Gray to show him that I had not stolen his doctrine. But I cannot tell whether to publish now would not be base & paltry …
This is a trumpery affair to trouble you with; but you cannot tell how much obliged I sh[oul]d be for your advice.125
Everything Darwin writes here is truthful; many a person would not have worried about the morality of going ahead and publishing manuscript material built up, as he so often told his correspondents, over twenty years of experimenting and reading, comparing and testing. Certainly, most of his fellow scientists would have made sure they got the credit for their work without squirming on the hook of conscience in this way. J
ealousy and sharp practice were rife in the small world of science. Richard Owen was not above praising his own works by reviewing them anonymously in the Edinburgh Review and comparing them favourably with the work of others; he was to do this in his dismissive review of Origin of Species in April 1860, though he always denied being the author, as well he might.126 Wallace was to some extent an unknown quantity: Darwin and he had corresponded intermittently and cordially for a few years, but they did not really know one another. Would he feel anger if Darwin published now? Would he even come out as a controversialist and accuse Darwin of intellectual theft or dishonesty? Of the men Darwin knew best, Huxley, though as honest a man as himself, would probably have felt less compromised than his friend did; Hooker, too, would not have hesitated to put his own work into the public domain in the knowledge that, however it might seem to others, he did have precedence and was doing nothing wrong in claiming it. But then these active men, living and working in the thick of London professional science, and capable of fighting their corner against prejudice and rivalry, would not have waited so long as Darwin to publish their work, and the current problem would not have arisen.
Darwin felt unready to publish until he had painstakingly covered every possibility that his theory might be disproved; in addition, his miserable health held him back, as did also – importantly – the anxiety of his devout wife Emma about the consequences for religious faith were the theory to be accepted. He had no desire to upset Emma, and beyond her he could imagine a whole community of readers who would balk at taking the step towards agnosticism which he himself had taken without fuss. In his autobiography, written late in life, he described how as a young scientist he could not believe in miracles; nor could he believe in Christianity ‘as a divine revelation’. The rate at which he lost his faith was ‘very slow’ and therefore not distressing,
and I have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother [Erasmus] and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.
And this is a damnable doctrine …
The old argument of design in nature, as given in Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.127
This is remarkable for its clarity and certainty; in the Origin itself he was necessarily more circumspect, leaving readers to draw such conclusions for themselves if they wished. When his son Francis came to print the autobiography in his father’s Life and Letters in 1887, five years after Darwin’s death, Emma vetoed this passage as ‘raw’, and in deference to her objection it was omitted.128
In one of his letters to Darwin from the Malay Archipelago Wallace broached the difficult subject of mankind’s place in the new theory of evolution. Darwin wrote to him on 22 December 1857: ‘You ask whether I shall discuss “man”.’ The answer was, ‘I think I shall avoid the whole subject, as so surrounded with prejudices, though I fully admit that it is the highest & most interesting problem for the naturalist.’129 Later he explained in his autobiography his views on the human species and how he came to deal with the problem in The Descent of Man, published in 1871, twelve years after Origin of Species:
As soon as I had become, in the year 1837 or 1838, convinced that species were mutable productions, I could not avoid the belief that man must come under the same law. Accordingly I collected notes on the subject for my own satisfaction, and not for a long time with any intention of publishing. Although in the Origin of Species, the derivation of any particular species is never discussed, yet I thought it best, in order that no honourable man should accuse me of concealing my views, to add that by the work in question ‘light would be thrown on the origin of man and his history’.130
In other words, he wished neither to offend religious believers by directly discussing humanity in Origin nor to pretend that the human species existed outside the law of evolution. Upsetting his own wife and the many people who still believed in miracles, an afterlife for humanity, heaven and hell, and the immutability of all species created whole and final by God was not something Darwin was in a hurry to do. It was an uncomfortable irony for him that he, the most uncontroversial of men, was required by the workings of his own mind to stand forth in the spotlight of fame and notoriety, for even if he omitted humanity from his work, conclusions contrary to religious beliefs would be drawn. Yet he had a story to tell, and it was only natural that he should wish to receive the acclaim (even if accompanied by hostile criticism) due to him; otherwise what was the point of all his hard work? Against Lyell’s advice he had delayed until it might be too late to claim originality in the field in which he had laboured so long and hard. It was to Lyell, to Hooker, and to Huxley that he now turned for reassurance and support. Lyell, he wrote in a postscript to the letter of 25 June, was ‘as a Lord Chancellor’ to him.131
By Tuesday, 29 June Darwin had heard from both Hooker and Lyell. He wrote to the former, thanking him. ‘You have acted with more kindness & so has Lyell even than I could have expected from you both most kind as you are.’ He added that he could easily get a copy made of the letter outlining his theory which he had written to Asa Gray in America in September 1857, though he worried that it was ‘too short’.132 Lyell and Hooker were planning to solve Darwin’s problem by having Wallace’s paper and some extracts from Darwin’s writings which friends had already read, including the letter to Gray, read out at the impending meeting of the Linnaean Society. They would show that both men had arrived at the theory of natural selection independently, but that Darwin had expressed it first.
By a stroke of luck the death of the former president Robert Brown had induced the society to postpone its summer meeting from 17 June, the day before Darwin received Wallace’s letter, to Thursday, 1 July. This meant that Darwin (and Wallace) would not have to wait until September to have their papers made public. The Linnaean Society published its annual proceedings in August. Most importantly, the arrangement satisfied Darwin’s honour while ensuring that Wallace, so many thousands of miles from home, ten weeks away from receiving his next letter, and nearly four years from arriving home from the Malay Archipelago, was fairly treated in London. (Wallace announced his arrival in England from the Pavilion Hotel, Folkestone, on 31 March 1862, writing to Philip Sclater, secretary of the Zoological Society, that he was back, bringing with him 3,000 bird skins, 20,000 beetles and butterflies, as well as two of the famous elusive birds of paradise – live specimens arriving in Europe for the first time – which were intended for the society.133)
Lyell and Hooker lost no time. On 30 June they wrote a carefully worded letter to the secretary of the Linnaean Society:
The accompanying papers, … which all relate to the same subject, viz. the Laws which affect the Production of Varieties, Races, and Species, contain the results of the investigations of two indefatigable naturalists, Mr Charles Darwin and Mr Alfred Wallace.
These gentlemen having, independently and unknown to one another, conceived the same very ingenious theory to account for the appearance and perpetuation of varieties and of specific forms on our planet, may both fairly claim the merit of being original thinkers in this important line of inquiry; but neither of them having published his views, though Mr Darwin has for many years past been repeatedly urged by us to do so, and both authors having now unreservedly placed their papers in our hands, we think it would best promote the interests of science that a selection from them should be laid before the Linnaean Society.134
The three papers, given in order of composition, were ‘Extracts
from a M.S. work on Species’ by Darwin, sketched in 1839 and copied in 1844, which had been read by Hooker; an abstract of Darwin’s letter to Professor Gray of Harvard of September 1857, showing, said Hooker and Lyell, that Darwin’s views ‘remained unaltered from 1839 to 1857’; and Wallace’s essay, ‘On the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type’, written in Ternate in February 1858 ‘for the perusal of his friend and correspondent Mr Darwin, and sent to him with the expressed wish that it should be forwarded to Sir Charles Lyell, if Mr Darwin thought it sufficiently novel and interesting’.135 Thus was Darwin’s problem solved; it could be shown that neither he nor Wallace had ‘borrowed’ ideas from one another, and that he had reached his conclusions several years before Wallace. Darwin was grateful to his friends, but still felt guilty, now also worrying that he was asking too much of them. ‘Do not waste much time’, he urged Hooker on 29 June. ‘It is miserable in me to care at all about priority.’136 The stage was set for 1 July. What would the society’s members make of these short but groundbreaking essays? What, if anything, would the wider public think?
Though Darwin cared very much – too much, he feared – about the effect of his and Wallace’s work, he was also coping with family tragedy. In the letter he wrote to Hooker on 29 June thanking him for his kindness he also had cause to add:
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