by Adam Gopnik
And it came at a familiar social cost: the inward- turning bourgeois family is, from a dour view of the puritanical historian, a bit of the Hummer of human arrangements, a gas- guzzler of social capital. All the social goods are drawn inward while less fortunate classes are put to work to sustain the privileged unit—the Darwins had a staff of about a dozen, whom they patronized—while offstage Chartists roar and the working classes struggle for identity (and for the vote) and the tranquil daydream of garden and nursery goes on.
But, as Tocqueville and Voltaire alike have taught us, the man who cultivates his garden is likelier to be the man who worries about other people's ills than the man who has to scramble for roots or the one who scribbles in his study. Court practices and city values, of the kind Darwin had absorbed in London, bend toward a hypersensitivity to status—status in the academy, or in the university—while garden life bends toward family practices and family values, with their hypersensitivity to security. The bourgeois obsession with security has its ugly side, but it also has a blessed one. As Tocqueville had seen a little while before, home-making, which ought to make people more selfish, often makes them less so; it gives them a stake in other people's houses. It is not so much the establishment of a garden but the ownership of a gate that moves people from liking a society based on favors to liking one based on rights. Enclosing our garden broadens our circle of compassion.
Certainly, it did for Darwin. Though remaining very much what he was born to be, a wealthy landowner struggling with the realities of post–free trade Britain—“although I am on principle a free- trader, of course I am not willing to make a larger reduction than necessary to retain a good tenant,” he wrote once, waspishly to his agent—he also became acutely conscious of injustice and cruelty, and impressed his children with his energy against the exploitation of child labor, and against local cruelty to animals.
Of all those children, his favorite was his second child and first daughter, Annie. Her particular appeal to him is hard to name, but it's obvious from the earliest letters that he wrote about her. Darwin, like any father, loved all his children equally, and had his favorites, too. One has the strong sense that he saw himself in Annie—a slight awkwardness, a desire to please people, a sensitivity, and above all, an urge to learn. In one way, she seems to have been the Beth March of the Darwin family, the girl all loved. But she wasn't shy or retiring, just the opposite, really. For any parent, the possession of a child who seems to reproduce one's own characteristics is special, and a child with real curiosity must have seemed like the chief blessing in the life of a curious man. “Father, I have a question”—those words, natural to any bright child, seem to have fallen from Annie's lips more often than from her brothers’.
No, it wasn't her Beth March qualities that her father loved, her angel- in- the- house femininity. It was her intelligence. We know that she had the habit, unusual in anyone and unencouraged in most Victorian girls, of reading dictionaries, searching for the meaning of words. One imagines her loving if slightly baffled mother braiding her hair as the sensitive and serious girl reads; one feels that she fell on the Darwin rather than the Wedgwood side of this very inbred family. There's no stronger or more confounding emotion in the world—one that brings the mystery of reproduction and sex more brightly to a sensitive man's attention—than the existence of a child of the opposite sex who resembles you, no bigger emotion than the love that a father feels for a girl child in whom he nonetheless sees not her mother but himself.
Darwin's immersion in his family life—the Darwin family would later play bassoons to earthworms, to see if the worms could hear—also nearly came at a scientific cost. Although Darwin was working throughout, you can't escape the feeling that his reluctance to publish, his delay, was partly a reluctance to give up the serenity of the life he had found for the anxiety of the intellectual battlefield, which, he knew—or thought he knew— awaited him at the other end of publication.
Darwin's illness, of course, intruded as well. By now, there are as many diagnoses for Darwin's puzzling recurrent sickness as there are occasions of it. They run from the purely psychosomatic— Darwin was sick with self- doubt—to the entirely medical—Darwin had contracted Chagas’ disease on the Beagle. In his letters, his illness certainly sounds more physical—episodic and baffling—than psychological. (Psychological ailments are usually pervasive and depressing.) Yet though clearly the sickness was “real”—Darwin had to have Emma write letters for him to correspondents when he was too ill to write himself—-when he's up and writing his letters, he sure doesn't sound like a sick guy. On the contrary throughout the 1840s, his letters ring with the sound of a happy man at happy work, a man in love with his work and wife and children. Writing to Emma in 1848, when he is away tending to his sick father, he writes, “Thanks for your very nice letter received this morning, with all the news about the dear children: I suppose now & be hanged to you, you will allow Annie is something. I believe, as Sir J.[ohn W.] L[ubbock] said of his friend, that she is a second Mozart, any how she is more than a Mozart, considering her Darwin blood.” (The Darwins were notoriously unmusical.) Then he makes a joke about Emma's brother Hensleigh “think[ing] he has settled the Free Will question, but heredetariness [sic] practically demonstrates, that we have none whatever.… I daresay not a word of this note is really mine; it is all hereditary, except my love for you.”
Annie is something. And then she fell ill. In Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution, Randal Keynes, a Darwin descendant who had access to previously private family papers, makes the case, quietly and convincingly, that the view of existence that underlies The Origin, with its sober stoicism about the role of death and destruction in making new life, was shadowed by Darwin's experience of his favorite child's death.
She fell ill in 1850, with what seems to have been a form of tuberculosis, and her frantic parents spent months trying all the futile therapies that people had in the nineteenth century, not unlike the delaying actions of many contemporary cancer treatments. Darwin kept daily notes on her treatment, marking futilely that she was “poorly” or “little wakeful.” He borrowed books for her, and since she was too weak now to read herself, he read them out loud to her. As he watched his favorite child sicken and suffer, he read Francis Newman's account of the transformation of his own faith, which turned, as those cases did so often in those years, on the meaninglessness of children's suffering, which seemed, seen close up, incompatible with the idea of a good God. (Keynes details at length the heartbreaking efforts Darwin made to keep his head by writing memos on Annie's failing.)
In the end, nothing helped, and Annie died at the age of ten, after a long vigil at a holiday villa in Malvern where Charles had taken her for comfort. Emma, who had to remain at home, got regular letters from her husband, each one sadder than the last. Finally he wrote, “My dearest Emma, I pray God Fanny's note may have prepared you. She went to her final sleep most tranquilly, most sweetly at 12 o'clock to- day.” In her own diary, where Emma had been keeping track of the news from Annie's bed, she wrote merely “12 O'Clock.”
Nothing really prepares us for the too soon loss of someone we love. Darwin had lost his father, and his mother, but nothing could have prepared him for losing Annie. It is like watching someone sink straight down into the waves, who will never return and never be recovered, while life continues on the surface. This sense, of the ongoing life of the world suddenly cut off irretrievably, of a life going on of which Annie no longer knows a thing, and in which her absence is absolute and permanent, is true grief—-no memory can help it; no promise of meeting after can alter it. King Lear's “never's” are the horrible truth; once she was here, and she will never be again.
His sister- in- law Fanny, who was with him at Malvern, said that Charles had broken down, and cried for hours. Annie was buried at Malvern, but her father didn't attend the funeral. Heartbroken, Darwin composed a ten- page memorial and locked it in his desk. It is written in his best naturalist's manner: �
�She danced well, & was extremely fond of it. She liked reading, but evinced no particular line of taste. She had one singular habit, which, I presume would ultimately have turned into some pursuit; namely a strong pleasure in looking out words or names in dictionaries.” But the inventory was not unemotional. “She must have known how we loved her,” he concludes. “Oh that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly we do still.”
Within days he was back at work on his book, tackling one of the hardest points in his theory, the absence of “intermediary forms,” the reality that between any two species we do not see, either on earth or in the fossil record, all the many living things that lay in between, and must connect them. He transferred his affection to her sister Henrietta, who became his editor and assistant and trusted first reader. She said that he hardly spoke of Annie openly twice again in his life. And what remained of his faith was dead too—and, more important, what remained of his belief that he needed to show faith in order to keep faith with the wife he loved.
All of these pressures—human and intellectual, the brave urge to tell a new idea and the wise urge to tell it slant enough to have it be mistaken for the old truths—were working on him as he sat down, at last, in the late ’50s, to write On the Origin of Species. All the pleasures and pressures of the past decade acted on him: the pleasure of explanation in simple terms, the pressure of not being understood; the pleasure of having accumulated abundant examples, the pressure of succumbing to overabundant illustration; the pleasure of having a clear argument to make, the pressure of having to make it clear; the pleasure of pushing at last to make a summary of an argument, the crucial pressure of having Alfred Wallace, polite and deferential but, after all, also in possession of the same theory, waiting. Above all, the pleasure of knowing that the mystery of mysteries could be solved, basic truth found—and the pressure of knowing that parts of the truth would bring nothing but more grief to the one he loved most, and would leave forever in the dirt a child he loved. Truth had both to be said and to be softened, and at length.
The Origin is, as he explained after, the abstract of an abstract, a simpler version of the first contracted, then expanded version of his great work that he had been dreaming of in the ’40s. He realized that he had to write a completely new kind of story, in a tone that would make it seem arrived at; he had to present dynamite as brick, and build a house, only to explode the old foundations. Long- felt speculation had to be presented as close- watched observation, and a general idea about life had to be presented as a sequence of ideas about dogs.
At the start of The Origin, after Darwin announces that he will study and treat the great problem of species—“that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers”—there is a sudden deceleration of intensity. He devotes the first chapter to an exhaustive examination of the techniques of dog breeders and pigeon fanciers. A feeling of disorientation is followed by a rising sense of delight. We feel a bit as we do at the beginning of Henry IV when we are told that the young prince has surrounded himself with dangerous companions—only to meet a fat old knight and his pathetic hangers- on.
Turning the pages, we realize that Darwin, the greatest Victorian sage, does not write like a Victorian sage. He writes like a Victorian novelist. Absent from his work is the pseudo- biblical rhetoric, the misty imprecations favored by geniuses of a more or less reactionary temper, like Ruskin and Carlyle, or the parliamentary ponderousness of the writers of a more or less progressive sensibility, like Macaulay and Arnold. Darwin's prose is calm and exact and, in its way, witty—not aphoristic, but ready to seize on a small point to make a large one, closer to George Eliot and Anthony Trollope than to his contemporary defenders, like T. H. Huxley and John Tyndall. But then Darwin had a novelist's problem when he sat down to write: how to reconcile the endless variation of the natural world with a set of organizing patterns. (“Variation under Domestication,” the title of the first chapter of On the Origin of Species, could be the title of the collected works of Eliot, as, for that matter, Selection in Relation to Sex could be that of Trollope's.)
On the surface, The Origin is a very strange book, a book designed to prove an ambitious thesis: that life has a single family, and that it all has changed over generations from simple forms to more complex ones by an unplanned winnowing out of new features through the competition among organisms for existence. It is not a survey of the field from a new point of view. It is, as Darwin said, “one long argument”—an argument with illustration, not a survey with instances. Everything is always varying; any variation that helps an organism eat better and have more sex will enable it to have more kids with the same feature, who will have more sex and eat better too, until the other, older kind of organism just dies out. Anything that helps in the struggle for existence will be saved. But it is an argument that reads like a story, not an abstraction applied narrowly to life but a commonality won from observation. Look at what these creatures are like! Look what they do! See how strange they are! Doesn't a single moral come to mind?
The point that Darwin wishes to make through the agency of dogs and birds, though not directly demonstrative of his thesis, is brilliantly illustrative of it. If a wolf—-within a time frame so short that it can almost entirely be recorded, and by means so simple that they can be mastered even by illiterate people—could be transformed through selective breeding into everything from a Great Dane to a toy Pekingese, then surely Nature, working on a time scale so much greater, could produce even more dramatic transformations—say, monkey to man. Similarly, if one kind of pigeon can become all kinds of pigeons—some to deliver mail and others just to pout and look pretty—then one kind of animal could surely become many others as it descended through time and the pressures of specialized niches.
Instead of entering the argument by the front door of the temple, where people debate the origin of the earth and the destiny of man, Darwin, with an artless shrug, enters through the back door of a barn. Do we really know what happens when animals change? Well, yes, he says, and here's what we know, very exactly. Nor is this a mere gesture occupying a page or two (“one need only look at the rich achievements of the domestic breeder to see …”) and pointing in a general way toward an acknowledged truth. Darwin offers instead a complex and exhaustive demonstration of how animal domestication and breeding work, by someone who has been in the shed with the birds and the eggs. We learn countless details about how pigeon fanciers change pigeons, and about how cattle vary in pasture. His immersion in the field enables him not only to make his primary point at length but also to make a critical secondary point: that even when domestic breeders aren't trying to vary their cattle, the cattle vary anyway, through isolation and inbreeding. Change happens when you want it to happen, and when you don't.
What's more, the proud domestic pigeon breeders, ignorant of biology, insist that each of their many breeds must derive from a unique species, even though biologists know that the many kinds of domestic pigeon arise from one common species, our old familiar Central Park friend. Darwin gently uses the biologist against the breeder, the breeder against the biologist. The climactic passage of The Origin's opening chapter is at once innocently wide- eyed and scalpel- sharp, using the amused first person to make the central, impersonal point:
I have discussed the probable origin of domestic pigeons at some, yet quite insufficient, length; because when I first kept pigeons and watched the several kinds… I felt fully as much difficulty in believing that since they had been domesticated they had all proceeded from a common parent, as any naturalist could in coming to a similar conclusion in regard to the many species of finches, or other large groups of birds, in nature. One circumstance has struck me much; namely, that nearly all the breeders of the various domestic animals and the cultivators of plants, with whom I have conversed, or whose treatises I have read, are firmly convinced that the several breeds to which each has attended, are descended from so many aboriginally distinct species. Ask, as I have asked, a
celebrated raiser of Hereford cattle, whether his cattle might not have descended from Long- horns … and he will laugh you to scorn. I have never met a pigeon, or poultry, or duck, or rabbit fancier, who was not fully convinced that each main breed was descended from a distinct species. Van Mons, in his treatise on pears and apples, shows how utterly he disbelieves that the several sorts, for instance a Ribston- pippin or Codlin- apple, could ever have proceeded from the seeds of the same tree…. May not those naturalists who, knowing far less of the laws of inheritance than does the breeder, and knowing no more than he does of the intermediate links in the long lines of descent, yet admit that many of our domestic races have descended from the same parents—may they not learn a lesson of caution, when they deride the idea of species in a state of nature being lineal descendants of other species?