Darwin and the Barnacle

by Rebecca Stott

  Darwin went shopping, too; but unlike Emma’s shopping list, which may have included some of the new fabrics she had seen at the Exhibition, or new books from the London Library, Darwin’s list included scissors and gold size. He visited Smith and Beck, the suppliers of his microscope, on Colman Street to renew his supply of the gold size that he used for sealing his barnacle specimens between glass slides. Mr Smith was keen to show his eminent customer that asphalt might do a better job. It came in one-shilling bottles, he explained, lasted longer, was easier to apply and formed a more effective seal. Darwin bought several bottles.26 Some time in this week, Charles walked alone to the Strand, carrying his two pairs of scissors. Weiss and Co. at number 62 The Strand were indeed shamed by the complaints of one of their most famous customers. They took the two pairs of scissors and promised their best service. They listened to Darwin’s passionate and frustrated explanations about how he needed springs so that he could dissect with his elbow to the sky, and they admired the scissors he had borrowed from George Newport; but, Mr Weiss pointed out, Darwin’s own scissors perhaps only needed a little adjustment and sharpening. They were, after all, almost identical to Mr Newport’s. Darwin had to agree; he would not need to buy a new pair if Weiss could achieve some magic with the polishing and sharpening machines.27 So he left his precious scissors in the Strand, Just as he had left his precious manuscript in Old Burlington Street: trusting.

  Darwin walked back along the Strand past the scientific and optical instrument shops and past John Chapman’s publishing house at number 142, where billboards advertised second-hand books from Chapman’s first catalogue. Chapman had published so many of the books Darwin had read recently: Francis Newman’s books and Harriet Martineau’s dangerously atheistical latest publication. Chapman seemed to be the daring centre of a radical coalition; his Friday night soirées were attracting attention across London, Erasmus said. So Harriet had found her radical non-conformist coalition, her outspoken family; and behind these doors that opened on to the Strand and above the shop, the life of this household was a daring one, Erasmus gossiped. Chapman’s house was always full of visitors and lodgers, particularly this summer, and some said that his wife Susanna ran the house unaware that her husband was having an affair with the family governess. Yet another woman had joined the household in January of that year, a Mary Ann Evans, and Chapman’s attentions towards his brilliant and freethinking new lodger had filled the house with further tensions and jealousies – common knowledge amongst those who attended the soirées, such as Erasmus. He’d planned to buy and relaunch the ailing Westminster Review, people said, and make Mary Ann Evans the sub-editor. Dedicated to progress, it would compete with the Edinburgh and the Quarterly; but something had gone wrong and Mary Ann Evans had mysteriously disappeared, driven out by the other women in the family, some said.28

  The first week of August was an anxious week for Darwin, despite the interesting diversions of shopping and dioramas and Erasmus’s gossip. It passed slowly. More than anything Darwin waited to hear from Lankester, who was not due back from Paris until 7 August. Emma and he had agreed to leave on Saturday, 9 August, so on the seventh he wrote to Lankester, reminding him of their arrangement and telling him that he would send Parslow to Old Burlington Street between 9 o’clock and 10 o’clock on Saturday morning to pick up the manuscript and take it to the printers. This would be leaving it till the very last minute, but this was the whole point of coming to London, after all. He had become obsessed by the care of this manuscript, afraid to leave it for a moment in the care of another until he was sure that it was in the process of printing.

  Darwin was afraid. It was only five months since he had left his most precious daughter in the care of Gully and he had lost her. There would be no more risks; but he tried to restrain himself in the letter to Lankester. He didn’t want to be demanding or difficult: ‘My reason for wishing my own servant to take the MS is that I have not a copy of a page, & I would on no account undergo the labour I have spent on it, & therefore am very unwilling to trust it to the tender mercies of a public conveyance … I hope you have much enjoyed the brilliant festivities at Paris.’29

  So on Saturday morning, with the bags all packed and ready to leave, Parslow set off for Old Burlington Street. He returned an hour or so later with bad news: Lankester was not yet back from Paris. He hadn’t even glanced at the manuscript. It had been sitting there on Lankester’s desk unseen for nearly two weeks. Darwin was distraught. He could not decide what to do. He cancelled the carriage, resolved to stay another day and send Parslow again in the morning. By the evening, however, he’d decided that he could not make Emma and the children wait for longer. Emma was anxious to be back in Down; they both wanted to see the younger children. Lankester might not be back for several more days. He would just have to trust Lankester, Emma said. So once again Darwin wrote cautiously, careful not to let Lankester sense his fears. He asked the publisher to entrust the delivery to a reliable servant of his own, when the time came, and to send him a note at Down House when the manuscript had reached its destination safely. ‘Forgive my silly particularity,’ he wrote, poignantly. He was a man fearful of loss – fearful of blunders. He was a cautious man.

  Back in Down, a box of barnacle larvae awaited him in his study with the small pile of letters: more rare specimens from Bate. He sent back the scissors to Newport and wrote to thank Bate. A few days later the first of the printed pages of the second volume began to arrive from the printers – on time. Over the next months these pages would arrive section by section for him to proofread. His labours for the second book were finally over and it looked good, he thought – better than the first volume. He had been right to trust Lankester and to be patient with Sowerby and Bate. His generosity to Bate and his blunders had reaped rich rewards. It was important to keep these friendships and correspondences alive, he told John Lubbock, training him in the ways of a gentleman naturalist. Charm, good nature and good manners – these oiled all the wheels of his complex dependencies on his publishers, his servants, the men who collected for him, and the young collectors whose work he read. It was in his nature to be gentlemanly, to avoid bad feeling, even if sometimes it was a struggle to keep his temper and his patience; but he wasn’t entirely sure William had inherited this good nature. He wrote to his son in Rugby with important advice that autumn:

  You will surely find that the greatest pleasure in life is in being beloved; & this depends almost more on pleasant manners, than on being kind with grave & gruff manners. You are almost always kind & only want the more easily acquired external appearance. Depend upon it, that the only way to acquire pleasant manners is to try to please everybody you come near, your school fellows, servants & everyone. Do, my own dear Boy, sometimes think over this, for you have plenty of sense & observation.

  Love from Mamma. Yours affectionately, C. Darwin.30

  Notes

  1 CD to J. S. Disnurr, 6 May 1851, Correspondence 5: pp. 36–7.

  2 CD to Edward Forbes, May–June 1851, Correspondence 5: p. 33.

  3 One of the ironies of this letter is that subsequent research (D. J. Crisp, ‘Extending Darwin’s Investigation on the Barnacle Life-History’, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, vol. 20 (1983), pp. 73–83) has shown that Darwin made a significant blunder in his interpretation of the female parts of the barnacle in his identification of the oviduct as the cement-making gland.

  4 CD to Charles Spence Bate, 13 June 1851, Correspondence 5: p. 43; CD’s reference here to being pipped to the post by others refers to his own work on the geographical description of Arctic and alpine plants, which Edward Forbes anticipated in 1846.

  5CD to Charles Spence Bate, 13 June 1851, Correspondence 5: pp. 43–4.

  6 Ibid., p. 44.

  7 CD to J. S. Disnurr, 13 June 1851, Correspondence 5, p. 45. For Forbes’ use of the dredge see Philip F. Rehbock, ‘The Early Dredgers: Naturalizing in British Seas, 1830–1850’, Journal of History of Biology, vol 12 (1979), pp. 293�
�368.

  8 See Adrian Desmond, ‘Robert E. Grant: The Social Predicament of a Pre-Darwinian Transmutationist’, in The Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 17, no. 2 (Summer 1984), pp. 189–223.

  9 Darwin was happy to write Huxley a reference in October that year for his application for a chair in natural history in Toronto, Canada. But Huxley would not be successful.

  10 CD to Robert Ball, 26 May 1851, Correspondence 5: pp. 37–8. He did ask to see a South American barnacle in the collection, however, which he probably thought might be another Arthrobalanus.

  11 See Correspondence 5, pp. 38, 40, 47.

  12 There is a blank in the copy of the letter here where the copyist clearly could not decipher the word.

  13 CD to J. S. Disnurr, 13 June 1851, Correspondence 5: p. 45.

  14 R. D. Keynes, ed., Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary (Cambridge: CUP, 1988), p. 49.

  15 Roualeyn George Gordon Gumming, Five Years of a Hunter’s Life in the Far Interior of South Africa, 2 volumes (London: John Murray, 1850), vol. 1, p. 358.

  16 Herbert Edwardes, A Year on the Punjab Frontier in 1848–9, 2 volumes (London: Richard Bentley, 1851), vol. 1, p. 29.

  17 Works of Darwin vol. 11: The Lepadidae, p. 238.

  18 CD to George Newport, 24 July 1851, Correspondence 5: p. 51.

  19 Ibid.

  20 I am grateful to Polly Smith and Dr Nick Evans of the Ray Society for tracking down Edwin Lankester’s London address.

  21 Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven and London: Yale University Press: 1999), p. 178.

  22 The Athenaeum, no. 1240, 2 August 1851, p. 833. Emma’s diary records that they visited ‘The Polytechnic Overland Mail’ and the ‘Polytechnic Conjurors’. There were two diorama/ panoramas that summer called ‘The Overland Mail to India’; neither were in the Polytechnic on Regent Street, but the show described by The Athenaeum, was held in the Gallery of Illustration, also on Regent Street, which probably accounts for Emma’s confusion. The Darwins would have seen the Gallery of Illustration show rather than the one held in the Willis Rooms by Albert Smith, for Altick states that Albert Smith’s show had gone on tour by the end of July when the Darwins arrived (Altick, p. 474). For further information about the history of the diorama see ‘The Diorama in Great Britain in the 1820s’, by R. Derek Wood in the History of Photography, Autumn 1993, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 284–95; and Altick, Richard D, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass., USA: Belknap Press, 1978).

  23 The Athenaeum, no. 1240, 2 August 1851, pp. 830–1.

  24 Ibid.

  25 Dickens wrote about the London panoramas in Household Words, through a fictional character addicted to panoramas, ‘Mr Booley’, Household Words 1 (1850), 73–7.

  26 CD to C. S. Bate, 18 August 1851: ‘Smith & Beck of 6 Colman St City, assure me that the Asphalte which they sell in is bottles is better than Gold size for the purpose, I mentioned to you, I have got a bottle but have not yet tried it.’ Correspondence 5: p. 56.

  27 CD to George Newport, 24 July 1851, Correspondence 5: pp. 51–2, CD to George Newport, 12 August 1851, Correspondence 5: pp. 54–5.

  28 For an account of the launch of the Westminster Review and of the relationship between George Eliot and John Chapman see Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot and John Chapman with Chapman’s Diaries (London: Archon Books, 1969).

  29 CD to Edwin Lankester, 7 August 1851, Correspondence 5: pp. 53–4.

  30 CD to William Erasmus Darwin

  10

  Drawing the Line

  The Sea of Faith

  Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

  Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

  But now I only hear

  Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

  Retreating, to the breath

  Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

  And naked shingles of the world.

  From Mathew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’

  Dawn on 2 October 1851. Darwin, in his black cloak and with his walking stick, slipping out of the house for his usual walk before breakfast, stops to admire the pear trees espaliered along the low brick wall. It is cold. The air is full of the smell of damp leaves, raked into piles along the edge of the meadow; here in the kitchen garden an early-morning mist curls up off the wet orchard grass, and down in the lower fields and in the wood the soil is thick and sticky. Conkers fall in the wood, unheard. Pinioned, clipped and groomed into neat but unnatural shapes, each reaching out for the next in the row, the pear trees look like a row of children’s cut-out paper figures, or a row of soldiers on parade in gold and scarlet, branches horizontal like outstretched arms – all different varieties, carefully selected in order to ripen at different times during the autumn and winter. The Marie Louise pear tree, named after Napoleon Bonaparte’s empress, in this late-autumn month bears the heaviest burden, branches heavy with gold and russet-coloured leaves sheltering gold and russet-blushing fruit. The leaves are already beginning to turn and fall, but the fruit hangs suspended in air, pendulous, ready to drop. Today Brookes, the gardener, will crop the Marie Louise tree, his calloused hands cradling the fruit’s curves as he twists and deftly separates fruit from tree. There may be as many as a hundred pears from this one tree this year, Darwin marvels – more than they have ever had from a single pear tree. He must remember to write and tell William at school, and to tell Brookes to put some aside for William’s visit in early November.

  They are cousins, these trees, holding hands along the wall – varieties bred by orchardmen in Belgium, France and Holland over hundreds of years, through patient grafting and cross-pollination, selected for his new garden by Darwin’s own cousin, the clergyman, William Fox, and carried here as young trees from specialist suppliers. Fox, who had an already established garden in his Cheshire rectory, had chosen pears that would ripen at different times of the year. Fox, the family man, breeder, farmer and clergyman, was now the father often, and he still asked after the Down pear trees sometimes in his letters, as if they were family members. Every year these maturing and pinioned trees offered up more and more treasure. After the cropping Etty and George helped wrap the pears in paper, comparing the colours and patterns on the speckled, dappled, veined or spotted skins, smelling or touching them with eyes closed, mouths shaping their French names: Beurre d’Alenbery, yellow with traces of russet; Winter Nelis, rounder, yellowy-green with russet patches; Marie Louise, rich yellow sprinkled and mottled with light russet on the exposed side; Passe Colmar, grass-green with russet spots; and Ne Plus Meuris, green and red and sweet-smelling – cousins with a common ancestor trained to yield at different times, slight but prize-winning variations accumulating generation by generation and continuing to accumulate with each feathering of pollen on to flower or skilled cut of the grafting knife, or pressing of prized seed into warm wet soil.1

  Hadn’t Pliny complained about the taste and texture of pears in Ancient Rome? What poor stock the early wild ancestors of these splendid trees then have been? But since Pliny’s disappointed bite, thousands of years of French, British and Flemish skill throughout the cultivated world had bred scores of varieties – thousands of years and long lines of pear-tree descent, each new cross-pollination enhancing shape, taste, colour, smell. Cultivation; and if Pliny were to walk this way, what would he say to the exquisite melting of sweet white nineteenth-century pear flesh? Honey, cinnamon, butter, sugar – tastes nurtured by breeders and orchardmen shaping nature in flowers and kitchen gardens like Darwin’s own, improving and modifying without end.2 What might cultivated pears taste like in three hundred more years with yet greater improvements in agriculture and soil fertilization? Liebig, the German chemist, had been speculating about precisely this in his Familiar Letters on Chemistry, the book that lay on his desk, Darwin reflects, that he must remember to post to William: ‘Many of our formers are like the alchemists of old, – they are searching for the miraculous seed, – the means, which, without any furth
er supply of nourishment to a soil scarcely rich enough to be sprinkled with indigenous plants, shall produce crops of grain a hundred-fold.’3

  And what of the alchemy of parents, training up their own next generation, like gardeners? What of the training he and Emma had given to William, the schooling at Mitcham and now the transplantation to Rugby planned for the boy the following year? Would the decision be regretted later? Would William’s young mind benefit from training and pruning or be softened and contracted by it? What about six-year-old George? His time was coming up now. Would a classical education suit such a practical and active boy? He was so good with his hands – so technically minded, such a fine draftsman. Even now he was pestering his mother to agree to the trip to Uncle Francis’s house in Etruria, which had been planned for weeks and postponed the day before because of the baby’s cold. George needed distracting. Excited by the trip to London and the Great Exhibition in the summer, he was hungry for more visits and adventures, bored and restless at Down, but not yet old enough to begin schooling or tuition. Instead he spent his days drawing ships, soldiers and drummers, and talking about them to anyone who would listen. War was on his mind. War was in the air – the servants gossiped about invasions and the French. Louis Napoleon was dangerous and not to be trusted, they said, a man hungry for power.