Darwin and the Barnacle
Page 11
Earlier that summer, in 1846, Darwin had sat in the new summer-house in the rain and congratulated himself on his good fortune. Listening to the rain drumming on the summerhouse roof and watching it drip from the leaves of the hornbeams and hazels around him, he was writing to his wife, Emma, who was also his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood. Emma had taken William, Annie and baby George to the seaside for a short holiday, leaving Charles to tend the newly planted flower garden and the two-year-old Henrietta – or ‘Trotty’, as she was now called, named after Toby Veck in Dickens’ The Chimes. Emma had aunts who lived in Tenby, a fishing village in Wales, an ideal place for a holiday. She needed the rest, with four children under the age of ten; and it might have been five if, in the fraught months after they had first moved into Down House, her new baby, Mary Eleanor, had not died aged only three weeks. Now there were the house renovations to deal with and the builders, a new nursemaid and a husband who, for all his generous affability and delight in the children, was wedded to his study and his microscope.
Darwin, too, needed a holiday that summer – from his wife and the small and increasingly articulate children. The house full of the sounds of sawing and hammering, his stomach painful, he played with Trotty and then passed her over to Brodie, the nurse, so that he could take his two blue opium-based pills to settle his stomach and retire to the summerhouse for a couple of hours to write letters. The first he wrote was addressed to Emma in Tenby: ‘I have been sitting in the summer-house, whilst watching the thunder-storms, & thinking what a fortunate man I am, so well off in worldly circumstances, with such dear little children, & such a Trotty, & far more than all with such a wife.’7
Darwin might well consider himself fortunate in 1846. These were the ‘hungry forties’; famine and unemployment were increasing the divide between rich and poor across Britain and Europe. The potato crop had failed the year before and bread prices were still high because the Corn Laws, established during the Napoleonic Wars to protect the income of the landowners and wheat growers of England, placed high taxes on imported corn. Now the urban and rural poor were paying the price for this government protection of landowners’ profits, particularly now that the potato crops had failed. The famine in Ireland was terrible and the newspapers were full of debates about what the government should do: intervene or not? Perhaps new crops could be introduced that would alleviate the trouble. Darwin had even looked out the Chilean potato tubers he had brought back from the Chonos Archipelago, wondering if these would provide a viable alternative to the Irish potato; but the tubers had, frustratingly, perished in storage.
Darwin had a large house, a secure income that enabled him to pursue his scientific interests undisturbed, a growing and largely healthy family, and a small estate in Lincolnshire with its own tidy income. He was all too aware that others were not so fortunate. He had seen a man crying with desperation only days before. The foreman on the building works at Down House, John Lewis, exasperated with disagreements between the builders he had contracted in, had fired the entire team. At a time of high unemployment, the consequences for some of these men would be terrible. One builder broke down and begged Darwin to reinstate him. Darwin described the incident to Emma in his letter: ‘his wife had come from a distance with a Baby & is taken very ill – The poor man was crying with misery.’8 The Darwins persuaded Lewis to re-employ him. Employment was, for some, a matter of life or death. The Darwins, like others in their position, did what they could to help.
The Irish potato famine of 1845–6 was a terrible testimony to Thomas Malthus’s theory of population growth, which Darwin had read in 1838. In his ‘Essay on the Principle of Population’, Malthus argued that the tendency of mankind was to reproduce at such a rate that, unless it was slowed down by natural ‘checks’, the number of human beings would outstrip the amount of food available to feed them. These natural checks were early death, disease, famine, epidemics and war, and they meant that generally the number of individuals existing at any one time was kept in balance with the amount of food available. This was true throughout nature, Malthus argued. War, destruction, conflict, death, famine – they were all necessary; terrible but natural and necessary. Reading this essay, Darwin had found the key to natural selection. It is the fittest who survive the conflict and the destruction, he realized: the strongest wings, the largest mouth, the longest legs. Struggle ensured adaptation of species – a further conceptual piece of the jigsaw.
Darwin was also investing in land in Lincolnshire, attaching himself more firmly to the land. His father, who would nowadays be called a venture capitalist, assured him that land was a good insurance against a stock-market crash. Property was too expensive in Kent, so Darwin decided to buy 324 acres in Lincolnshire. The land cost him £12,500 but would yield £400 a year. He would be an absentee landlord, but he was also an improving one: he set up an allotment scheme on the estate to encourage self-sufficiency; he built a new farmhouse for the tenant, and he helped to pay for the village school. When the Corn Laws were repealed in 1846, his investment proved to be less lucrative than he had expected, for the tenant farmer argued that Darwin should reduce the rent now that corn had fallen in price. Darwin, who, like many liberal intellectuals in the 1840s, had argued that the Corn Laws should be repealed – how else would the poor survive the famine? – had not expected the repeal to make such a difference to his own income. Darwin’s father had not predicted this. Still, he and Emma had a joint income of £14,000 a year, which kept them more than comfortable.9
Darwin hadn’t been sure on his return from the Beagle that married life would be like this. He had wanted a wife. He had envied his friends their growing families and comfortable parsonages in the country. But was this the life for him? Living in London, in Great Marlborough Street, in the late 1830s with Syms Covington, his naturalist servant, free to work late into the night, free to surround himself with the dusty clutter of specimen bottles, rocks and books, he hadn’t been sure that marriage was the right thing for such a man as he. He wasn’t sure that settling down might not amount to a degree of suffocation. It had taken an evening to work the problem through, with a pen and paper. Two columns – like Hamlet: ‘To be or not to be?’ ‘Many’ and ‘Not Many’ he wrote neatly across the tops of these two columns. Under ‘Marry’ his first word was ‘Children’. His second entry was ‘Constant Companion’ (entered with some significant reservations and ironic hesitancies: ‘Constant Companion … who will feel interested in one, – object to be beloved and played with. – better than a dog anyhow’). His third entry was ‘Home’. Then he added, anxiously underlining the words: ‘But terrible loss of time’. However, his other voice answered: ‘My God, it is intolerable to think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. – No, no won’t do. – Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. – Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with a good fire, & books & music perhaps – Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlboro’ St.’10
And under ‘Not Marry’ there was this time problem again. If he didn’t many, ‘perhaps the sentence would be degradation into indolent, idle fool’. But if he were to marry, he would have to socialize, be a family man, furnish a house: ‘Eheu!! I never should know French, – or see the Continent – or go to America, or go up in a balloon, or take solitary trip to Wales – poor slave – you will be worse than a Negro.’
Then the ‘Marry’ voice answered again: ‘Never mind my boy Cheer up – One cannot live this solitary life, with groggy old age, friendless & cold, & childless staring one in ones face, already beginning to wrinkle. – Never mind, trust to chance – keep a sharp look out – There’s many a happy slave.11 And here he was seven years later, in Down, sitting in a summerhouse in the rain, with a growing family and a rather more complex set of ideas about family life than he had been able to imagine in Great Marlborough Street in 1838. Children bothered him and made him weep. They charmed him over breakfast with thei
r funny stories and irritated him when they bounced into his study, wanting string or paper for their play, or, as Annie did, to bring him the box from the hallway that contained his heavily rationed snuff, her eyes bright with mischief. They made him laugh and they loved him – sometimes they bribed him to come out of the study for a few hours to play. He liked to play – down on the drawing-room floor, tickling, down in the wood, playing hide-and-seek. They terrified him with their fragility. Little animalcules, they were to be studied and measured and watched and worried over.”12
Darwin worried about heredity. After all, he and Emma were cousins. Within a year of marrying her, he had begun to investigate the effects of breeding and interbreeding. Then, in 1845, with Emma four months pregnant with George, three years after the death of the baby Mary, he began reading Isodore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s book on interbreeding and monstrosity, Histoire Générale et Particulière des Anomalies. Darwin and Emma affectionately called the book Monsters & Co. Emma’s French was considerably better than Charles’s, so the two worked together on some of the more difficult passages as Emma’s pregnancy progressed. Did they speak openly about their fears of inherited sickness in their children? Did these ideas alarm Emma?
The children were vulnerable, even in the protective surroundings of Down. Bessie, the new nursemaid, who was little more than a teenager herself, had taken the children and their visiting cousins for a walk in the thick frost the previous winter, carrying the baby Trotty into the woods. A young housemaid and six children all under the age often. The eldest boys, aged nine and eight, had run off and become separated. The boys, unable to find Bessie and the younger children, had run back to Down House to raise the alarm. Charles, calming the frightened Emma, took the butler Parslow with him. They had searched the woods as the light was failing, asking urgently at local farmhouses, calling out Bessie’s name. Eventually, frightened voices had answered them from the darkening woods. Bessie was huddled in a tree with her cloak around Trotty and Annie and the two young boy cousins, aged eight and five. Darwin and Parslow had taken them to a local farmhouse for food and a warm drink and then sent them all straight to bed.
So had he been right to marry? And what of this soft wife on the sofa? Back in 1838 he had wondered if a wife would enable him to fulfil his ‘destination’. Would he have more chance of becoming the butterfly he wanted to be with a wife by his side?
We poor bachelors are only half men, – creeping like caterpillars through the world, without fulfilling our destination … Of the future I know nothing, I never look further ahead than two or three Chapters – for my life is now measured by volume, chapters & sheets & has little to do with the sun. As for a wife, that most interesting specimen in the whole series of vertebrate animals, Providence only know[s] whether I shall ever capture one or to be able to feed her if caught.13
Would she be luminous after dark? But Emma was far more complex than he had anticipated in his columns of logic. She was a fabulous pianist who wept during concerts. She was a fine mother who kept a calm and liberal household for their children and tolerated mess so long as the children were happily occupied. Her politics were moderate and humanitarian and she had a circle of cultured and spirited friends. She shared Darwin’s interest in novels, reading to him for long hours every afternoon, not because it was her duty but because she loved books and enjoyed reading without the children interrupting every two minutes. She was a critical reader, often judgemental of the prose style and narrative decisions of the novelists she read; and though constantly pregnant she was stoical and uncomplaining, despite the fact that her own nausea almost certainly matched his own. Darwin became more and more dependent upon her as his illnesses took hold.
Down House was two hours out of London, sixteen miles from St Paul’s. Darwin had found his rock forty miles from the sea, but there were ghosts of shore memories even here in rural Kent. On windy days the children said the panes of glass in the north windows tasted of salt; there was the Sand Walk flanked by trees not unlike South American shores on very hot days, and there were the water-worn pebbles he had built into the garden paths, remembered long afterwards by his granddaughter Gwen Raverat, who had often stayed at Down House as a child:
The path in front of the verandah was made of large round water-worn pebbles from some sea-beach. They were not loose but stuck down tight in moss and sand and were black and shiny, as if they had been polished. I adored those pebbles. I mean literally, adored; worshipped…. Long after I have forgotten all my human loves, I shall remember the smell of a gooseberry leaf or the feel of wet grass on my feet, or the pebbles in the path.14
And there was the chalk beneath the house – the great massy chalk downs, rocks made by the bodies of infinite numbers of infinitely old and infinitely small sea creatures. Because chalk was used in the production of wallpaper, sea creatures lined the thick walls of Down. The Annals of Natural History magazine encouraged its readers to look at wallpaper under the new microscopes now available, for: ‘When magnified 300 diameters and penetrated with Canada balsam, [you will see] a delicate mosaic of elegant coralline animalcules, invisible to the naked eye, but, if sufficiently magnified, more beautiful than any painting that covers them.’15
So it was here, in October 1846, that Darwin made a decision about the next ten years of his life. He had a theory of the origin of species, a theory of mutability and common ancestry that he had been working on since 1837, when he opened his first transmutation notebook; a heretical theory, which had begun to take shape in the hold of the Beagle and which had found fuller shape in Darwin’s London lodgings amongst the dusty bones, glass jars and rocks, the spoils of his voyage; a theory that would one day be published but which was, for the moment, shelved, postponed, 231 handwritten pages carefully copied out. It was safely filed away on his shelves and its author, fearful of his early death, had already written a set of clear instructions to his wife about how to handle its publication in the event of his death. He felt the weight and responsibility of his secret.
11 Charles Darwin and his son William, 1842
Two years earlier, in 1844, Darwin had been almost ready to release his species theory. He had even begun to try it out on his friends. He had written to the young botanist Joseph Hooker first, who, at the age of twenty-six, had just returned from four years as an assistant surgeon on board the Erebus, assistant to the surgeon Robert McCormick, who had been sacked from the Beagle in Rio. Joseph was the son of Sir William Hooker, Director of the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew;16 he was well connected, well travelled and refreshingly open-minded about natural philosophy. When Darwin wrote to Hooker in 1844, prepared to reveal his thinking for the first time on paper, his conclusions were quite clear but he was hesitant, careful with his words, mindful that even Hooker might be shocked: ‘I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.’17
By October 1844 he had been more confident and assertive, writing to the Reverend Jenyns: ‘The general conclusion at which I have slowly been driven from a directly opposite conviction is that species are mutable & that allied species are co-descendants of common stocks. I know how much I open myself to reproach, for such a conclusion, but I have at least honestly and deliberately come to it.’18
Then, in late 1844, a small volume, bound in bright-red cloth, had appeared in bookshops around the country and sold out within a few days. A beautifully written, anonymously authored book called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. This little book was an epic, telling the story of the Earth from its beginning, spinning through time and space, documenting the beginnings of life from simple marine invertebrates up through fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and man. It was a sensation. Its author was Robert Chambers, an encyclopaedist, journalist and publisher from Edinburgh, but his identity would not be known for a very long time. In the winter of 1844 readers of every class, background and political and religious persuasion were talking about Vestiges, g
uessing at the author’s identity, reviewing and assessing the book, discussing its implications or condemning the book as heresy.19 ‘We started out as fish?’ people were asking. How ridiculous. How fascinating.20
Darwin, in London on 20 November 1844, had opened the book apprehensively in the noisy British Museum library, afraid that this book had superseded his own theory. What he found looked heavily botched to him and full of mistakes: ‘the writing & arrangement are certainly admirable, but his geology strikes me as bad, & his zoology far worse’,21 he wrote to Hooker later. For all his mistakes, however, the author of Vestiges had drawn transmutation into the drawing-room conversations of Britain and had drawn out its religious and philosophical implications. Heresy, some said; scandal, others. Adam Sedgwick, Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge, called it ‘A foul book [in which] gross credulity and rank infidelity joined in unlawful marriage’.22 Vestiges was bad news for Darwin. He had watched the reviews and refutations continue late into 1845 and the book continue to sell in its thousands. He had been troubled, too, by the way the reviewers discredited the author of Vestiges for clearly not having undertaken close fieldwork. ‘Mr Vestiges’ was a mere speculator in science, they had said. Hooker had said as much in September 1845 and Darwin agreed with him: ‘no one has the right to examine the question of species who has not minutely described many’.23 In this climate he dared not publish.