Darwin and the Barnacle

by Rebecca Stott

  I assure you that, though I am a rich man, when I think of the future I very often ardently wish I was settled in one of our Colonies, for I have now four sons (seven children in all, and more coming), and what on earth to bring them up to I do not know. A young man may here slave for years in any profession and not make a penny. Many people think that Californian gold will half ruin all those who live on the interest of accumulated gold or capital, and if that does happen I will certainly emigrate. Whenever you write again tell me how far you think a gentleman with capital would get on in New South Wales … What interest can you get for money in a safe investment? … I was pleased to see the other day that you have a railway commenced, and before they have one in any part of Italy or Turkey.26

  Railway speculation still provided the Darwin family with a considerable income. Since 1847 Darwin, like millions of other men and women with capital, had been investing heavily in railways. By the end of 1850 the paid-up share capital of UK railways amounted to £187 million, and the scale of this investment transformed the capital market and revolutionized the London Stock Exchange. But by 1850, railway speculation had become more risky; the markets were fluctuating alarmingly and dividends were down. For some this would make a major difference to annual incomes. Charlotte Brontë wrote, for instance, at the end of 1849:

  MY DEAR SIR, – I must not thank you for, but acknowledge the receipt of your letter. The business is certainly very bad; worse than I thought, and much worse than my father has any idea of. In fact, the little railway property I possessed, according to original prices, formed already a small competency for me, with my views and habits. Now, scarcely any portion of it can, with security, be calculated upon. I must open this view of the case to my father by degrees; and, meanwhile, wait patiently till I see how affairs are likely to turn…. However the matter may terminate, I ought perhaps to be rather thankful than dissatisfied. When I look at my own case, and compare it with that of thousands besides, I scarcely see room for a murmur. Many, very many, are by the late strange railway system deprived almost of their daily bread. Such then as have only lost provision laid up for the future, should take care how they complain.27

  The market was so gorged that shares could fall any moment and companies made bankrupt. As with Charlotte Brontë and other railway speculators, for Darwin it was all a question of judging the right time to cash in the shares. A few days too early or too late and a fortune might be lost. Charles and Emma talked anxiously about the future of the family and its income. They were wealthy, but Charles was not sure whether he was investing wisely enough to ensure that there would be enough money to set up the boys. The economic situation in 1850 seemed perilous for a man with so much invested in the railways. All he could do was to continue to keep meticulous accounts, watch the rise and fall of the markets and be ready when the time came to sell his shares quickly. This was where the speculation came in: being able to read the signs and gamble.

  The same instinct for risk would be needed for the publication of his species theory, of course: knowing when enough facts constituted a general law, and then knowing precisely when to try out that general law on the readers who would be its judge and jury. Once that move had been made, there would be no way back.

  All year Darwin had been haunted by a metaphor that Lyell had used in one of his speeches at the Geological Society. It was, Darwin wrote to him, a ‘capital’ metaphor. ‘In a word’, Lyell had said, ‘the movement of the inorganic world is obvious and palpable, and might be likened to the minute-hand of a clock, the progress of which can be seen and heard, whereas the fluctuations of the living creation are nearly invisible, and resemble the motion of the hour-hand of the time-piece.’28 It was a capital metaphor indeed, for the fluctuations of capital investments seemed to belong to the minute hand of Lyell’s metaphor. The movements of the market were visible, traceable, even if they could not be predicted; but whilst the life of the children and the house and the complex financial markets in which they were all caught up were moving like the minute hand, Darwin felt himself to be disconnected, tied to the hour hand of time. Perhaps he was even moving backwards while the life of Down House hurtled forwards; certainly his health, as recorded and measured and coded in his health diaries, seemed to move backwards as well as forwards. He wrote to Lyell: ‘We are all pretty flourishing here; though I have been retrograding a little, & I think I stand excitement & fatigue hardly better than in old days & this keeps me from coming to London. – My cirripedal task is an eternal one; I make no perceptible progress – I am sure that they belong to the Hour-hand, – & I groan under my task.’29

  Behind all this urgency, the slipping away of time, was a fear that his time would run out, that his hereditary sickness would catch up with him, that he would die before he had a chance to publish his greatest speculation, the species theory. The decade had turned into another – he had not planned to be working on the barnacles in the 50s; but whilst he speculated on his own life expectancy and even felt that the Water Cure had enabled him to cheat death, buy himself a little more time, slow down the retrogression a little, he had not speculated about hereditary illness striking other parts of his family. Already, since the summer, a cluster of bacilli had begun to work its way invisibly through Annie Darwin’s nine-year-old body. These bacteria and the consumption they caused were as varied and unpredictable, particularly in children, as Darwin’s barnacles. They might attack anywhere, not just the lungs. A London doctor wrote in 1848 about the disease that was responsible for one in four deaths: ‘Consumption, Decline or Phthisis, is the plague-spot of our climate; amongst diseases it is the most frequent and the most fatal; it is the destroying angel who claims a fourth of all who die … Consumption steadily and surely pursues its way, and desolation of heart, of home, of hope, follow in its path.’30 It was a disease of the hour hand; its workings were steady but imperceptible.

  Annie first fell ill in the summer, when a spell of hot July weather broke in thunder and lightning. Emma noted that Annie, who was so cheerful and loving, ‘never was well many days together afterwards, finding her lessons a great effort and frequently crying after she went to bed’.31 Emma tried to find novel ways of cheering her unhappy eldest daughter, who was weak, feverish at nights, and anxious that her parents were close by at all times. In August, Emma took Annie and her governess for a carriage ride to Knole House, and a few days later she persuaded Charles to come with her to take the eldest children to stay with Uncle Joe and Aunt Caroline at Leith Hill Place, where the children collected bilberries. In October Emma sent Annie and Etty to Ramsgate with Miss Thorley, hoping that a few weeks of sea air and bathing might improve her health. Two weeks later Charles and Emma went down to join them, and Emma noted with pleasure Annie’s ‘bright face in meeting us at the station’. Parents and children walked together on the pier and bathed twice. Etty made doll’s shoes out of seaweed on the beach and Charles, Emma noted, ‘entered into daily life with a youthfulness of enjoyment which made us feel we saw more of him in a week of holiday than in a month at home’.32

  Two days later Annie developed a fever and headache. Emma asked for a mattress to be placed on the floor of their bedroom, and another late-summer storm broke around their lodging house and out at sea. Charles had to return to Down; he had lost too much time already and he was in complex negotiations with both Sowerby and the publishers of his book, the Ray Society. He took Etty and Miss Thorley with him, leaving Emma with Annie until she was fit to travel. Emma began to steel herself for the worst. She was now sure that there was something seriously wrong with her eldest daughter – something that was not going to be blown away by sea air – and she was anxious to protect Charles as long as possible from her worst fears. As soon as she managed to get Annie back to Down on the train, she made an appointment with Dr Henry Holland and took Annie up to London for her first consultation. She returned with Annie to see him again in November.

  The women of Down House – Emma, Miss Thorley (the governess), Br
odie (the children’s nurse) and Great Aunt Sarah, Emma’s aunt – gathered protectively around the sick and uncharacteristically fretful child. Brodie had made her a little pocketbook while she had been away at the seaside, embroidered with flowers and leaves in chenille and silver thread and tied with a red-silk ribbon. Annie smiled broadly, delighted with her neat and pretty little book. She was nine when she started this first diary. Not sure at first what to record, she adopted her mother’s clipped style of diary entries and her subject matter: the weather and visitors were to be recorded regularly. Annie wrote in the very last days of November 185O:

  23 Cicely wrote to me. Went Aunt S. Rainy morn. But fine afternoon

  24 Very rainy all day.

  25 Cold but rather fine morn.

  26 Thremomiter 46.

  27 Greata wrote to me.33

  Annie returned her cousin’s letter a few days later: ‘We have got a new pony. It is rather a little one. I think your donkey sounds a very nice one. I should like to see your little white guinea-fowl. Are all the little turkeys sold? On Sunday it was raining dreadfully, and the pit in the sand walk was full of water. Is your swing taken down? Ours has been taken down a long while.’34 In her allusions to the rain and the swing being taken down, Annie shows her own child’s-eye-view sense of the passing of the year. No more swing until next summer, when it would be hung up again between the yew trees. But Annie would not be there to see it.

  Notes

  1 ‘Darwin [Erasmus] possesses the epidermis of poetry but not the cutis; the cortex without the liber, alburnum, lignum, or medulla.’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge on The Botanic Garden, in Anima Poetae (originally published 1805; London: Heinemann, 1895), p. 280.

  2 See Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (London: Pimlico, 1996), pp. 7–10. See also William Darwin’s recollections of his father’s financial advice in DAR112, 3c.

  3 See pages of The Times, in particular between 25 October and December 1845. There were twenty-nine articles in The Times on railway speculation from June 1845 to December 1845.

  4 See Jonathan Smith, Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), and Alborn, Timothy L., ‘The business of induction: industry and genius in the language of British scientific reform, 1820–1840’, History of Science vol. 34 (1996), pp. 91–121.

  5 William Whewell’s review of The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath, Edinburgh Review, vol. 106 (1857), pp. 314–15.

  6 See Stephen J. Gould, ‘Introduction’ to The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981); also Donna Haraway, Primate Visions (New York: Routledge, 1989), Introduction and chapter 14, for interesting discussions of this point.

  7 Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882, edited and with appendix and notes by Nora Barlow (London: Collins, 1958), p. 121.

  8 Later CD claimed that he had never properly acknowledged his debt to Lyell, writing ‘when seeing a thing never seen by Lyell, one yet saw it partially through his eyes’. Francis Darwin, Life and Letters (New York, 1888) vol. 2, p. 55; cited Jonathan Smith, ‘Seeing Through Lyell’s Eyes: The Uniformitarian Imagination and The Voyage of the Beagle’, in Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Madison and London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), p. 95.

  9 CD to J. D. Dana, 5 December 1849, Correspondence 4; p. 286.

  10 CD gives a long and detailed account of his writing processes and frustrations in ‘Darwin’s Thoughts on his Mental Processes’, in Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882, edited, with appendix and notes, by Nora Barlow (London: Collins, 1958), pp. 135–45.

  11 CD to Charles Lyell, 7 December 1849, Correspondence 4: p. 289.

  12 Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882, edited, with appendix and notes, by Nora Barlow (London: Collins, 1958), pp. 135–45.

  13 See DAR 185.10: 10 in the Darwin collection in Cambridge University Library for the children’s drawings on the back of Darwin’s manuscripts.

  14 Letter to J. D. Dana, 24 February 1850, Correspondence 4: p. 313.

  15 Charles Darwin, A Monograph of the Sub-Class Cirripedia (London Ray Society, 1851), pp. 292–3.

  16 CD to Charles Henry Lardner Woodd, 4 March 1850, Correspondence 4: pp. 316–7. Darwin’s fingers had been burnt by the general discrediting of his Glen Roy hypothesis in the 1840s; he had also seen what had happened to the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, denounced as a mere hypothesis, unsubstantiated by facts.

  17 William Harvey (1849), The Sea-Side Book: Being an Introduction to the Natural History of the British Coasts (London: John Van Voorst, 1849), pp. 4–5.

  18 Letter from J. D. Hooker to CD, 6 and 7 April 1850, Correspondence 4: pp. 327–8.

  19 Ibid., pp. 327–30.

  20 Darwin’s sons George and Francis both comment on Darwin’s respect for and anxiety about time. See in particular The Complete Edited Manuscript of Francis Darwin’s Preliminary Draft of the Reminiscences of My Father’s Life, ed. Robert Brown, Independent Study (Manuscript kept in the Darwin Correspondence Project office, Cambridge University Library), p. 54.

  21 CD to J. D. Hooker, 13 June 1850, Correspondence 4: p. 344.

  22 CD to James Sowerby, 13 April 1850, Correspondence 4: p. 332.

  23 CD to James Sowerby, [12 or 19 August] 1850, Correspondence 4: p. 349.

  24 CD to Richard Owen, 28 April 1850, Correspondence 4: p. 334.

  25 CD to W. D. Fox, 10 October 1850, Correspondence 4: p. 362.

  26 CD to Syms Covington, 23 November 1850, Correspondence 4: p. 369.

  27 Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte (Heinemann, Penguin, 1997), chapter 18.

  28 Lyell’s presidential address delivered at the anniversary meeting of the Geological Society on 15 February 1850, p.lxvı. Correspondence 4: p. 616; ‘Anniversary Address of the President’, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 6, p. lxv1.

  29 CD to Charles Lyell, 8 March 1850, Correspondence 4; p. 319.

  30 Randal Keynes, Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution (London: Fourth Estate, 2001), p. 201.

  31 Ibid., p. 149.

  32 Ibid., p. 152.

  33 Ibid., p. 157.

  34 Ibid., p. 155.

  8

  Writing Annie

  The month of April is proverbial for its fickleness, for its intermingling showers, and flitting gleams of sunshine; for all the species of weather in one day; for a clear mixture of clear and cloudy skies, greenness and nakedness, flying hail and abounding blossoms. But to a lover of Nature, it is not the less characterised by the spirit of expectation with which it imbues the mind.

  William Howitt, The Book of the Seasons (1831)

  It is a mild January afternoon in 1851; the days begin to lengthen. This morning’s post has brought Darwin the anal plates of the illustrations for his completed first barnacle volume from James Sowerby in London. He sits at his desk in front of the window checking the accuracy of the drawings with a magnifying glass, making the best of the thin and fading winter light. Laid out on the table in front of him are five pieces of paper, on each of which are fifty or sixty closely engraved shapes. Some look like conical shells, others like leaves, or fans, or claws. Many are delicately ridged. The drawings are of fossil stalked barnacle valves – valves that Darwin knows inside out. The tiny originals are lined up across the top of the table so that he can compare them to the engravings one last time before he returns the collections. Most of this set on his table belong to Robert Fitch, a Norwich chemist and geologist, a man whose patience has been sorely tried: Darwin intended to borrow his rare fossil collection for only a few weeks and he has now had it for a year. He has examined the valves in every light and from every angle. He can summon these shapes and ridges and patterns when his eyes are closed; and James Sowerby has made mistakes in the dra
wings – not many, but enough for Darwin to ask him to make five significant changes. This volume and its successors must be a perfect record.

  Now that the fossil stalked barnacle book is finished Darwin must return Fitch’s collection, this fruit of twenty years of collecting – perhaps the finest collection of fossil barnacles in the world – to its owner. Although it is unlikely he will ever see these ancient objects again, he is glad to let them go. This has been frustrating and at times impossible work – trying to identify and describe ancient species, working usually from a single valve that has survived imprinted into Norfolk chalk. Several valves arrived damaged and he has had to glue them back together again – embarrassing. He is determined they will survive the return journey. He puts a small piece of silver paper on to the desk and lifts one of the smallest valves onto it with a pair of tweezers. He writes its name carefully on the label that he will attach to the pill box in which it will travel through the post: Pollicipes angelini, one of the most ancient stalked barnacle forms, a survivor from the early Jurassic period. This is the barnacle ancestor – not the first, but certainly amongst the earliest generations of barnacles.